Stone Hardy is the UK market leader in the service and repair of tail lifts and shutters for commercial and passenger vehicles. First established in 1976, the organisation has grown, offering a 24/7 national service that helps ensure the vital logistics sector continues to operate.
Amanda Cook, Group Business Process Manager, explained the role Stone Hardy plays in keeping the nation’s infrastructure moving: “Our engineers service multiple sectors, including healthcare and food delivery, which have both grown in importance over the past 18 months.
Fast response times and experience are vital to get vehicles moving again. a supermarket must be unloaded within a certain time frame or the food will be wasted; a generator failure on a Mobile Covid Testing vehicle would put a halt to timecritical testing; a patient transfer vehicle with passengers who cannot be safely unloaded in a timely fashion would potentially even put health at risk – these are just a few examples of this urgency.
Minimising customer downtime is an essential part of our customer support, and we must fit in with our customers’ schedules – which can mean services and repairs late at night or during the weekends depending on the customer’s requirement. Our 24- hour service makes us a perfect fit.”
Business Critical
Of course providing a 24 hour service and timely despatch are not the only essential requirements to get the right result for Stone Hardy’s customers. Amanda continues: “Making sure our engineers get to the right place is essential. Prior to travelling to any location, we must check we are sending them to the correct address. Using Postcode Plus from AFD Software allows our team of 25 Controllers to quickly search for and confirm the address the engineer needs to get to – we simply cannot afford to get this information wrong.
Once we know the location of the vehicle, we then need to understand the specific situation. For unscheduled callouts in emergency situations, our systems allow us to prioritise the response based on each scenario.
Part of our emergency response undertaking is to have an engineer at the required location within 90 minutes from receiving the call. Each of our engineers’ vehicles is fitted with GPS tracking that gives our team a clear visual of who is best placed to respond, allowing us to deliver on our promised expected time of arrival.
This functionality is business critical to our organisation and we simply have to have accurate data. We would not be meeting the high levels of customer service and expectation if we were unable to locate the address we needed to get to – AFD has helped ensure this has never happened in the 5 years since they first partnered with us.”
Delivering Confidence
Selecting AFD Software as a data quality partner was an easy decision for Stone Hardy, Amanda concludes: “In 5 years of relying on AFD Software as our partner in address quality, we haven’t once had a depot manager complain that they haven’t been able to find the address or location to attend. Our requirements were listened to, understood and have been met.
Genuinely, I would say to any organisation that must get contact data right, The Postcode People at AFD Software do exactly what they say and deliver this accurate address data quickly and reliably.”
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.