19 March 2021
Kindertons has extended the opening hours of four of its largest UK depots to include weekends, in order to provide a more responsive service to their clients.
The depots in Atherstone, Bristol, Leeds and London have all joined Kindertons Central Support Depot in the Midlands, in opening from 7am – 7pm seven days a week to allow for greater flexibility in vehicle hire collection and drop off. The central support depot has successfully been operating on weekends for the last five years and such is the increase in demand and customer expectation, that Kindertons decided to widen this service across the other depots, earlier this year, to provide a speedier service to its customers. Customers can choose whether to collect and return their vehicle from their nearest depot or have it delivered to their home.
Steven O’Connor, Head of Depot Network commented: “In early 2020 plans were already taking shape to move our network to a seven-day operation nationally. We already had a limited operation over weekends and bank holidays with the existing central support operation, but it was clear that we needed to expand our capabilities to better serve our customers nationwide.
Despite the obvious negative aspects of the COVID pandemic this did give us the breathing space to completely change the structure of not only our depots but also to consult with staff on a rolling seven day rota.
Our new management structure at depot level has now brought in expertise from the wider logistics world, and since the commencement of the seven day operation at our four “Hub” depots, we have seen consistent increased demand across the country during weekends, which allowed the depots to make more efficient use of our resources.
Flexibility is also built into our current shift patterns to allow us to respond to increased demand as we gradually move back into a post covid world.
This is a really exciting time across the network and we are now ready to grow and get our customers back on the road quicker and provide the service we all expect in our 7 day society.
Scott Logan, Head of Deployment Services for Kindertons, added:
"Prior to extending our opening hours, we knew that there was more that we could do to meet customer expectations and this additional capacity means we’re now able to deliver in line with customer needs. We’re really delighted with how smoothly everything has gone so far.”