With over 30 years industry experience between them, Lorraine and George make every call their personal responsibility. With this philosophy the customer is ensured of receiving a quick and efficient response to their enquiry with any necessary action taken as soon as possible.

The secret of the success of the customer services operation is that although each customer is looked after individually, the operation is entirely IT driven through a bespoke package, developed and maintained by Shepley's own IT department.

The operation is focused through Lorraine and George, to whom all customer service enquiries are channelled. They are responsible for scheduling all jobs for production, and are able to monitor the progress of any order.

Lorraine explained: "The entire production process is monitored through the system, which allows us to pick up a job at any point in the process. In the event of a quality issue for example, the system enables us to pinpoint whether it is an operator, mechanical or product fault. By using the system we can be quickly alerted to repetitive fault, or pattern of errors if they occur, and of course we can immediately set about rectifying them."

By dealing directly with Lorraine or George, customers are confident that their query is being dealt with. They also take on the responsibility of communicating with other departments, so the customer is not faced with the frustrations of being passed from different departments accompanied by vague promises of action to be taken.

Lorraine continued; "We deal with all enquiries and some we can respond to immediately, however, we set ourselves the target of fulfiling all enquiries certainly on the same day and usually within an hour."

Lorraine and George do not spend all their time dealing with calls, as the average percentage of enquiries received represents less than 2.5 per cent of all frames ordered. They also closely monitor the production process, use the information gathered from enquiries and other feedback, and report trends and information regularly to the company directors and to the product development team.

Gary Torr, managing director, believes this is a major contributing factor allowing Shepley to maintain its competitive edge, he explained: "Most companies will have a system of dealing with customer enquiries, however, the Shepley system is unique because it is fully computerised but operated by an experienced team who are able to not only deal with enquiries to the satisfaction of the customer, but are also able to translate the information gathered into meaningful market intelligence."