As the country entered lockdown, as we are all aware a large amount of people began working from home, which presented issues when their IT equipment developed problems, as a number of suppliers not only refused to meet their SLA during the pandemic (unlike Centrex who committed to it and religiously met / continue to meet it), they also refused to complete home collections because of the risk. While the nervous feeling is understandable, a simple refusal to help was in our opinion wholly unacceptable & needed addressing.

Centrex looked at this issue form every possible angle, as not offering a service when people most needed us was simply not an option we would consider and we knew there had to be a way to do it.

With this determination, Centrex developed form scratch a totally contactless delivery and collection service, where a doorstep removal of good kit & placement of faulty kit into a specially sent box (that only the engineer had touched at the doorstep) took place. Once the fault kit had been placed in the box, the user then went back indoors so the engineer could simply placed bubble wrap on top of the device without touching the device and then seal the box. The quality of packaging was less critical, as by using our dedicated own trunking network we knew no damage would occur due to the methods of shipment applied.

When the boxes with devices within return returned to our central hub in Milton Keynes, they were automatically quarantined in date order for a period of seven days and upon release from quarantine, they were opened, the contents, serial numbers, asset numbers, etc were recorded and shared with the end customer and more importantly, the devices were all sanitised, cleaned and made COVID safe, so that they could be returned to support stock ready to be shipped to the next user.

The success of the service is shown by the fact that it continues without issue or interruption and the plan is to leave it in place for a long time to come by one of the main users, who are a large High Street bank