Wincor Nixdorf has today announced that its purpose built, 'state of the art' Customer Care Centre, located in Dartford, Kent, went live on the 9th May 2004.
The Centre controls the management and maintenance of Barclays’ self-service estate, which consists of Barclays and Woolwich 3,900 UK ATMs. The Dartford facility is responsible for both Wincor Nixdorf’s Help Desk and Field Support operation. In addition, the Centre also controls the security companies that perform the cash-in-transit operation.
Simon Newman, Channel Management Director, Barclays, states: "I am delighted that we have reached this significant milestone in the partnership between Barclays and Wincor Nixdorf. The new centre will help us deliver the best possible service through our ATM Network"
John Ennis, Banking Director of Wincor Nixdorf states: "The project to deliver the outsourced end to end maintenance and Helpdesk services for Barclays and Woolwich ATMs, has been one of the most exciting developments for us. Wincor Nixdorf now have a Customer Care Centre staffed with people who are focused on providing best in class availability across the bank’s self service channel. It is now our intention to offer our ATM management utility to other financial institutions and independent ATM deployers in the UK."
The heart of the Centre is an integrated database, which includes a state of the art monitoring system developed and built expressly for Wincor Nixdorf.
CENTRE OPERATIONS
Every two minutes, the Centre receives a live feed from Barclays’ mainframe with updates on the status of all Barclays UK ATMs. Any problem with an ATM immediately displays an error code, which indicates the severity of the problem and alerts a Help Desk agent straight away.
Dan Gilby, operations manager at the Centre explains: "Barclays set priorities for all their ATMs. Currently, some 20% in high usage areas are classed as premium response, with the remaining 80% classed as standard category."
To maximise response and solution times, the Centre operates a multiple-level support system. Initial alerts come to First Level agents who deal with 90% of ATMs that show a total or partial outage. The Centre is geared to be able to deal with 180,000 alerts per year – via its alerting system, which is expected to pick up the vast majority of failures - with the remainder through incoming phone calls from branches.
Gilby states: "All First Level agents are trained on ATMs – they do not work off scripts. Most have come from a banking background with a minimum of two years experience of working with ATMs and receive detailed training on Wincor Nixdorf machines and other leading ATMs."
Complex issues that cannot be resolved at First Level are automatically raised to Second Level, which is staffed by ATM engineers, each with a minimum of 2 years Field Service experience.
All Second Level agents can talk the branch through an extended fix. These agents are capable of dismantling and rebuilding an ATM – importantly they can also explain what to do in clear language. This means Barclays’ branch personnel deal with someone who understands ATMs and knows how to help non-technical people solve minor problems that may occur on branch ATMs.
This skill level also increases the Centre’s knowledge pool. Once the fix is complete, the Second Level can then educate the First Level agents. The Centre has working versions of all major ATMs, so First Level agents can receive a detailed hands-on brief on the solution.
If faults cannot be fixed over the phone, the system forwards the task to the Field Support operation, which has 65 field engineers covering the UK, all trained on ATM machines from Wincor Nixdorf and all leading suppliers.
When replacement parts are needed, Wincor Nixdorf’s automated online parts solution allocates parts, which engineers can collect from regionally located Forward Stock Locations (FSLs) to give nationwide parts availability.