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Unsung heroes provide customer satisfaction

Unsung heroes provide customer satisfaction

01/03/2010 | Channel: Business Improvement, Infrastructure

This month’s editorial is about saying thanks to all of the people involved in providing the Achilles Link-up scheme and the great work that they do

Improvements in the back room
While we often celebrate the improvements to the Link-up functionality and the number of organisations joining the system as buyers and suppliers we don’t often look at the behind-the-scenes improvements that underpin much of the more visible benefits. The unsung heroes of this are the Achilles IT team and the people who work with them testing, developing and doing the hard work in the background.

Over the course of the last two years there have been some significant improvements to the IT platform and to the infrastructure that delivers the scheme on your desktop. These include:

  • A full transfer of the whole system onto 64-bit infrastructure from the original 32 bit. This delivers a much more robust system, which has more processing capability.
  • Automatic system uptime monitoring with a configurable search being undertaken every four minutes. This checks the functionality and, because it also measures and reports on the time of the search also acts as a measure of system performance.
  • Development and implementation of a full set of administration tools and reports to allow significant improvements in the service offered by our Customer Care team and measurable improvements in processing time for questionnaires and audits.
  • Relocation of the hosting site in order to improve the reliability and emergency response provision plus enhanced security of data.
  • Development of the IT code to improve speed of response and robustness of the system.
This back room and unseen work continues all the time and is a key item in Achilles’ programme of improvements to the system.

Scheme numbers
When we normally talk about scheme numbers we refer to the number of organisations using or being members of the scheme. We thought it worthwhile giving some numbers about those involved in the delivery of the scheme. Currently these are:
  • Customer Care Team 10
  • Sales and Renewals Team 6
  • Audit operations 5
  • Auditors 28
  • Account Management Team 5
  • IT support 3
  • Marketing support 2
  • Link-up Senior Management 1
This gives a total of 60 people excluding HR, IT Development, Finance and the other support elements of running the business. Without the efforts of all of these we would not be able to deliver the scheme.

Link-up customer satisfaction survey
Achilles would like to thank everyone who responded to the customer satisfaction survey conducted at the end of last year. We are committed to acting on the feedback from the results as part of a strategic approach to improve the quality of our customer service and customers’ overall experience.

It has been very encouraging to see that a number of actions taken since our last survey have helped to improve our performance in specific areas. These include, the majority of customer queries being resolved in 24 hours; 79 per cent (73 per cent in 2008) of respondents were either satisfied or very satisfied with the time taken to resolve their issue; 77 per cent (62 per cent in 2008) of customers who responded are satisfied overall with the ease of use and quality of the Link-up Supplier Management System and 97 per cent of respondents think that Achilles staff are professional and courteous.

Visit www.rail.achilles.com and see the latest news, for more information.

Link-up audit – annual audit expiry dates
A number of Link-up suppliers who require audits have raised questions regarding changes to annual audit expiry dates. To clarify, Achilles Assessment Services confirm that the annual audit renewal date will remain fixed to the original audit renewal date. It will not be changed where delays due to late payment, last minute changes to product codes, or late completion of questionnaires occur.

For continuity purposes each year’s annual audit is required to take place by the annual audit renewal anniversary date. Any mid-year, additional audits due to the inclusion of extra auditable product codes will be incorporated into the next anniversary audit. There is no separate anniversary for these mid-year changes.

Infrarail
We will be attending the Infrarail exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham from
13th to 15th April this year. We look forward to meeting as many of our customers as possible at our Stand 266.

To find out more about Achilles, the Link-up Scheme and how we can help your organisation with risk management in the supply chain and create new opportunities for business please contact us:
Tel: 01235 861 118
Email: Link-up@achilles.com
Web: www.rail.achilles.com