The company’s new location will allow it to increase its capacity for manufacturing and testing the self-service ticketing machines supplied to rail operators, airports and hotels. It also employs a team of 25 engineers to cover the area between Aberdeen and Plymouth.

Shere uses the Supportworks service desk management solution to track calls at its support centre. The company currently has more than 1200 self-service machines installed nationwide. The system has been used to help it meet stringent SLAs and avoid financial penalties.

The self-service machines are often a critical aspect of customer’s business, generate significant revenue, hence the need for rapid attention when problems arise. For this reason, Supportworks has been integrated with the Insight monitoring solution and provides a traffic light system to monitor machine status in real time.

Shere is able to carry out remote fixing for certain faults. ‘Between 65 and 70% of calls are closed first time and the number of calls that we have to attend are smaller than you might think,’ said Dave Webster, Shere support manager. ‘We can do certain tasks remotely, such as turn the machine on and off and reboot, and the machines are quite resilient.’

When attending a call, the company’s engineers are able to process information through PDAs, including updating progress and the closing of calls. Faults are listed as critical, major or minor, with SLAs – specific to each client – of between zero and four hours (for critical) and 24 hours (for minor).

The self-ticketing machines are connected to customer local networks by VPN technology that provides direct feedback to support centre systems.

Maintenance calls, logged through the Hornbill system, are displayed on screens within the Shere call centre and analysed to determine the response required. ‘We sometimes fix machines before the customer is aware there’s a fault,’ said Webster.

Despite the company’s growth, it does not plan to increase its workforce. ‘We’re trying to do more with our current workforce by working smarter,’ said Webster.