Why should after-sales care be at the core of your business and solution forklift providers?

A huge number of variables go into your decision over which provider of forklift truck solutions: the price of a product; the number and type of options available; extras such as hire or finance. All of these are great ways to distinguish between one provider and the next, but have you ever considered the aftercare that you receive from your forklift provider of choice? Some consider it to be a nice extra to have, but the right sort of after-sales care can end up taking its provision from a ‘nice to have’ to something that’s central to your business. So what should good aftercare look like, and how can it be invaluable to your company? Let’s take a look at the difference that EP Care can make to your forklift fleet.

What is after-sales care?

The best aftercare isn’t a single product or service, but a holistic approach to keeping in touch with you after you have bought your forklift solution, making sure you know how to get help and support if you need it. This can include everything from comprehensive and ongoing training to maintenance advice and warranty support, but also includes the provision of everything you might need to help make your experience of the forklift solution you have invested in better. Let’s have a look at some of the main features you can expect from EP Care, EP Equipment’s aftercare package, and how they can help.

Training

They say a good workman never blames his tools, and they’re right about one thing: Even the best tool is useless in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it. EP Care’s after care support comes with a comprehensive programme of training to make sure that you and your staff are completely comfortable with the forklift solution. Not only that, it makes sure that you’re able to get the best out of your kit in a variety of scenarios so that you can use it to expand your business in other directions or tackle new and unexpected problems.

It’s a fact of life that staff come and go, and you don’t always have time to send your staff on live training sessions, so the ability to go back and refresh your team online is a must. This means that you can constantly up-skill your staff, training new members as they arrive, and keep the skills that they have learned within the business without having to organise lots of expensive training days or take too much time out of the business. With EP Care this training covers repair and maintenance issues, helping your staff to understand how they can make quick fault diagnose and field repairs. Efficient response can cut repair bills and downtime in half, so having this ability at your workers’ fingertips will greatly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the products that you buy.

The paperwork

Managing all of the paperwork associated with keeping track of a fleet of forklift trucks can be a nightmare, and it’s quite the administrative burden to manage it all. Not only that, but there are all kinds of materials that many sellers don’t even provide, especially technical information such as parts numbers. The best aftercare services, such as EP Care from EP Equipment, provide an online document handling service that allows you to access and store all of the documentation related to your forklift truck fleet in one easily accessible place. EP Care includes not only the usual documentation you would expect after a purchase, such as warranties and instruction manuals, but things such as common fault codes and their solutions, technical documentation such as hydraulic and circuit diagrams and technical support information.

EP has built the most comprehensive document center on EP Care. Dealers can search by product, or parts codes, to access various types materials of all trucks from operational manuals to parts manuals to technical service videos. Anything and everything can be yours to see at the push of a button. Something you could never have achieved relying on a box file full of paperwork to store your documentation.

Furthermore the warranty process is handled through EP Care. This saves not only the hassle of paperwork, it also saves the personnel resources often seen in many companies associated with handling warranty claims.

The numbers

The best kinds of after-sales care are the ones that don’t just kick in when something goes wrong, it’s also there to support you with the normal operation of your forklift truck fleet. EP Telematics fleet Management from EP Equipment is there to provide you with a huge amount of relevant data that gives you total remote oversight into the performance of your fleet. This is the kind of powerful tool that transforms the idea of aftercare from a ‘nice to have’ to an extremely powerful asset that can transform your business. Detailed telematics concerning every element of each truck’s performance allows your business to use data to revolutionise the way it uses and manages its assets, potentially saving thousands of pounds a year.

The best thing about using telematics in your business is that it’s scalable: You can use anything from the most simple to the most complex data to make positive changes to your operation. For example, using the telematics data to keep track of the battery life of a particular warehouse’s trucks gives you advance warning when they are running low on power, allowing you to charge them or swap them out for charged trucks and avoid them failing on the job. Using that information over a longer period of time, you can then create a better charging and maintenance schedule so that you automatically never find yourself a truck short, thereby saving yourself many hours of downtime. Then, in the even longer term, you can monitor your trucks’ performance in a range of areas over a year or two years and devise a predictive maintenance plan that keeps the maximum number of trucks in operation at any one time. Not only does this get you the most use out of the assets you already have, it also saves you downtime and avoids the waste of having too many spares just in case.

A helping hand

One of the most obvious, but still often overlooked, aspects of aftercare is the simple act of being able to get reliable help when its needed. Having knowledgeable and helpful staff on the end of a phone or online to troubleshoot issues can mean the difference between a quick fix and a long term issue. EP’s big difference is integrating that into a parts ordering system that uses a common system of product names and serial numbers then brings all of these strands together into a system that lets you report a problem, identify a solution and order the parts that you need to fix the problem all in one smooth journey. As we’ve said, aftercare shouldn’t just be something that you turn to in an emergency, and it should integrate smoothly into your way of working to ensure it makes all of your operations better. That’s why it’s important to have a helpful team on hand like EP’s to deal with all elements of keeping the trucks in the field running.

We have EP Europe in Belgium to provide local service with trucks, parts, training and technical support. We also have a professional crew in Hangzhou headquarter to provide timely and responsive service to dealers around the world.

Having help like this at your company’s disposal is vital when something goes wrong. It is up to you to join the dots between the issue, the diagnosis and the solution, which creates the possibility of delays between each step as you struggle to identify the problem or find it difficult to source the right parts. Ensuring that you have a reliable aftercare service set up heads off this potential disaster at the pass, and ensures you’re always prepared.

The forklift EP Care difference

EP Care is an invaluable accompaniment to a successful implementation of a new forklift truck fleet that combines excellent products with a commitment to a fruitful long term relationship. Not only are there a great range of points of contact that will enable you to get fast and useful help when you need it, there is also a great range of tools provided that are useful throughout the life of your new fleet. The age-old problem of legacy and handover is solved using EP Care’s excellent document handling and training services, which between them ensure that it’s easy to make sure that none of the vital knowledge about your forklift truck solution is lost when staff move on. The benefits to your business are limitless.

EP keeps a constant focus on parts documentation and availability. In combination with a shared vision to keep things simple and efficient. Whether you look at the encyclopaedic record of all your documentation so that it’s at your fingertips; whether you benefit from the simple and open source after sales tools; whether you mainly are looking for simple and easy find and order parts; whether you are mainly looking for an efficient warranty process: EP Care does it all. And supported by a great team for training, trouble shooting and support. The combined result is less costly downtime for your business, less time consuming paperwork for your staff, leaner and more efficient processes in your warehouse or factory and more support when things go wrong.

To find out more about EP Care you can see our dedicated page here or contact us to speak to someone on the team.