Parts for NCR systems – as well as third-party parts for a variety of multivendor ATM, point of sale, self-checkout and payment terminals – can now be delivered closer to customer sites at over 4,000 drop box sites nationwide. Normally located on petrol station forecourts, the drop boxes feature an input keyboard and screen and are linked by General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) mobile data connection to a central control hub.

The service managed by NCR’s nationwide delivery provider, DHL, means NCR field engineers receive a SMS alert about a part pick-up immediately when parts have been delivered to an allocated ParcelXchange site. Using their smartcard and unique PIN, they can then open the secure boxes on their way to a service call. To speed up the return of defective parts, engineers can print barcode labels at the ParcelXchange sites and leave them in the secure box for daily collection and delivery to NCR for repairs.

Deliveries can be made 24 hours a day. By cutting out the need to visit a fixed location courier depot to pick up repair parts, NCR engineers save hours of traveling time each day and reach customer sites more quickly. As NCR’s Customer Care Centre in Lanarkshire has complete visibility over the parts shipping/pickup process via a secure portal, customers are kept fully updated on status of NCR’s response to their service request.

Kris Levickis, NCR’s Worldwide Customer Services Business Operations Director for the UK & Ireland said, “As a leading provider of self-service solutions, NCR continually looks for ways to speed up every element of its customer services operations. Just as ATMs have revolutionised access to cash, this drop box technology will have a dramatic effect on NCR’s customer service levels by providing our engineers with secure, auditable and convenient access to parts on a self-service basis.”

NCR’s Customer Care Centre in Lanarkshire features advanced telephony and data technology to enable the quick resolution of an average of 3,500 customer service requests every day from throughout Europe. The continuous stream of service data received by NCR is organized within one of the world’s largest single repositories of IT services information (currently five Terabytes of data and growing). Using TeradataTM, NCR’s industry-leading decision support software, along with proprietary equipment diagnostics capabilities, NCR’s highly skilled service personnel analyze the data to identify equipment faults and in many cases, resolve the problem remotely.

Levickis concludes, "If a problem can’t be resolved remotely and an engineer needs to be dispatched, remote diagnosis gives NCR the advance information it needs to dispatch the right person with the right skills and the right parts to resolve the incident on the very first visit within very demanding timeframes."