Name something you hope never to see, though when you do, it makes you feel relieved and happy? It’s the sight of your coffee machine technician, tool case in hand, striding purposefully through the front door of your café. You have a problem with your coffee-making equipment and your tech has just arrived, sporting a determined look that says, ’I’m here to sort this out — and sort it out fast.’ You feel both relieved, and somewhat happier.
It may look to you as if he is just getting started, but it’s most likely that your technician has been thinking about your problem for the past 25 minutes while making his way across town to your café. In fact, he may have already made a call to a colleague to bounce a theory around and, even before setting foot through your front door, he will be 80% certain he knows exactly what’s happening with your machine. Ten minutes later, everything is fixed and it’s just like new. Now you’re really happy.
Our service technicians are the highly visible and tangible product of a larger (but equally dedicated) team who all work together towards our combined goal of getting a technician to a customer’s café as quickly as possible, equipped with all the expertise, tools and spare parts he needs to resolve every technical problem as fast as possible.
One of the vitally important support functions we provide is making sure that we always have the correct spare parts available. The Five Senses’ spare parts team ensure that each of our six field technicians and their service vans always have every single one of the 1041 items they are required to carry on board. This entails dealing with companies around the globe, along with all the issues that go with that such as shipping delays, exchange rates, lead times, back orders — and the list goes on.
Maintaining an accurate database of every service call is carried out by the technical admin team. In a twelve month period, the Five Senses’ service team responds to many thousands of requests for assistance and the tech admin team do a great job, making sure there is more than five years of service history available to the service techs at all times. The tech admin team also co-ordinate every aspect of the equipment installation process from ordering machines from our mostly international suppliers to arranging for the workshop techs to carry out the bench test, ready for the service techs to do the actual install. Speaking of the workshop techs, they also carry out modifications and machine overhauls as well as investigating solutions to difficult problems.
And don’t even get me started on tools, technical training, compliance with licencing regulations or R&D. As you can see, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes and it all converges on that one guy, your coffee machine technician. He’s at the pointy end of coffee life.
