Touch Story

Touch was established in 2003 in the belief that there is a gap in the on-site maintenance market. Typically, the market is dominated by large service providers who offer a managed services solution to their client base. A significant part of the service offering is the provision of on-site maintenance, covering a variety of product and service requirements. The vast majority of the product maintained is reasonably generic, commoditised in today's market. Many of the service providers have evolved from a traditional "break/fix" culture, employing highly skilled, highly paid resources that are now utilised on reasonably low skilled maintenance calls. The challenge to the service providers is how to reduce the cost and improve the utilisation of the on-site technicians. Over the last few years a standard option for the service providers has been to use technical couriers.

A typical technical courier company provides an owner/driver with limited skills, is call volume focused, and is managed by a team of ex -logistics/courier providers with limited support in terms of IT and limited understanding of the service industry.

Touch Difference
The Touch business model is designed to recognise that at all times we represent our customer on their client's premises. The core of our business model is to use our own skills and experience, to empathise with the challenges faced by our customers, to be trustworthy partner. The Touch value proposition is not based on deploying cheap resources but on using superior capabilities:

• Our technicians are all salaried employees, who have the necessary product training and customer care skills
• Our IT systems are designed to offer full service management functionality, to be easy to use, easy to integrate with our customer systems and are web enabled allowing our customer base visibility of the status of service calls and inventory
• Our commercial flexibility enables us to deliver a variety of options for our customers, "buying" into schemes of risk and reward. Our stance on service liability and product insurance demonstrates full ownership of our service provision
• Our logistics infrastructure is lean and entirely in-house. Logistics is a support function to our on-site services offering, not an overhead that needs to be "sweat". We have the skills and infrastructure to fully control the distribution of good or defective inventory throughout the UK