National reach, local approach

In a relatively short period of time Windsor Materials Handling has begun to take on some very substantial national accounts with companies such as Metsä Wood, Cranswick Convenience Foods, Pickfords, and Agrovista. This has led to the company from an Eastern England focus to much more comprehensive coverage.

This is underpinned by a strong ‘boots on the ground’ approach that has 12 depots placed throughout the country. Established in 1976, Windsor has enjoyed strong growth in recent years, with new branches including Chelmsford, with the acquisition of Ambassador Lift Trucks in July 2014, Slough, which opened in December 2014, and East Kilbride, which opened in June 2015.

Stephen Burton, Windsor MD says: “The increased geographic footprint means we are no longer regional but a national player, but the key is we still provide business on a local level.

“We have now won a number of large fleet deals, but we don’t forget where we’ve come from. We are built on service and 1-5 truck customers and we do not lose sight of that.”

Service is where Windsor excels, and indeed, the firm has won a major deal with food firm Brakes – focusing on the services side.

Stephen adds: “We’ve done a reasonable amount in a short period of time and we’re tendering for more. Even with national deals we provide local service. We have the advantages of a national proposition, but individuals at local level have local contact. We tailor the deal to suit the customer. If you want a call centre approach you can have it, or local service, or a hybrid of both.”

Smaller customers tend to want to deal with a service manager – who is also an engineer – an expert who can put an arm around them. But interestingly, Stephen has also found that many larger customers also see great benefits in this approach.

“A national, 200 truck customer, may have forklifts distributed rather thinly over a number of locations,” enthuses Stephen. “This means the manager at a local level often wants good, local service, he still wants an arm around the shoulder. That’s what often gets missed by other forklift suppliers with a more rigid, corporate approach.”

Windsor is a family-owned business and this is very important to the company’s values and its ability to meet high service standards.

“We have old-fashioned principles with a modern approach. We won’t be one of those companies that promises the Earth and delivers nothing. We treat every customer with the exact same level of importance. A lot of our competitors have different priority levels for key account customers, for example, but we have everyone priority level one.”

What do old-fashioned principles equate to in practice? Well for one, Windsor is against centralisation for the sake of it. “It can kill a company,” argues Stephen. “Don’t set up a centralised team if you don’t need to, this approach leads to firms forgetting about customers and becoming too focused on costs and internal KPIs. We want to be the number one MHE solutions provider, and that’s not about being the cheapest or the biggest.”

What does this translate to on the ground? For one, parts are held locally, service engineers are equipped locally, and engineers go out with the intention of repairing the truck, rather than visiting just to meet a KPI with the truck to be fixed at a later visit.

“We allocate engineers to customers, so they get to know the customers, their equipment and take pride in the ongoing good health of that equipment. They see them as ‘their’ trucks, and take a lot of pride in it. They know they’ve got to go back to it, so they’ve got to do it properly,” says Stephen. “They understand the faults, know the history and the background, the site specifics. This helps us hugely with first time fixes.”

Stephen adds that Windsor will use modern approaches, such as equipping engineers with tablets PCs, but the firm will not allow the technology to excuse a rigid, customer-unfriendly way of working.

“Tablets can be mis-used to push the engineer quickly from job to job,” says Stephen. “I speak to customers about this and they say engineers come to fix a truck and cannot do work on other trucks, they have to wait for it to be allocated. We think, unless there is a critical problem elsewhere, it is better to stay until the customer is happy. The danger with tablets is work schedules can be planned by people who don’t care about the customer. We’re a company that cares.”

The range

Windsor is an independent firm, with a consultative approach, that aims to give customers choice, while not being tied to one manufacturer.

The firm is a national partner for Doosan, the biggest reseller for Unicarriers in the UK, the importer for Komatsu in the UK, an importer for Tailift, and the second biggest JLG dealer in the UK.

“We take a dual product approach. We’ve got Doosan and Komatsu on the counterbalance side, with Tailift as a more budget choice, and Kalmar as the heavy option. For the warehouse, we’ve got Doosan and Atlet (Unicarriers). We don’t want a confusing portfolio, salespeople need to know enough about the products to be able to sell them and we have got to be able to maintain them well – we can’t expect engineers to do this if they have loads of brands to attend to. We must take into account training, access to parts etc…

“We have our preferred partners but if it is not within our range we’ll go scope it for customers.”

In keeping with the family approach and emphasis on local service, Windsor’s branch managers are empowered to run their branches – an important reason behind their ultimate success.

Stephen concludes: “Once we get customers on-board they don’t generally want to leave. From the moment we meet customers, they get a service from us, not just after-sales. We expect total account management from our sales guys, for instance. They are first point of contact every time, except for breakdown. It is this emphasis on taking responsibility and seeing the work through to the benefit of our customers that sets us apart from the competition.”