Customer Feedback Results FYE 2013

Firstly, thank you to all of our customers who have filled in customer feedback forms and sent them back to us. This has allowed us to monitor our performance over the last year, and will help us to improve our performance to you in the coming months.
 
During FYE13, we changed the way that we monitor and record our feedback results to incorporate the Net Promoter Score, an internationally recognised way of recording customer satisfaction levels that provides a figure which can be compared with other businesses and industries using the system. The change to our reporting method was undertaken in January 2013, and the analysis below covers those forms received between January and April 2013 using this new system. While it does not provide us with a full year’s results, it does give a useful snapshot on which to provide a comparison for next year’s scores and an assessment of how we've done so far this year.
 
Our customer feedback forms are split into five areas with a number of questions in each, and cover all aspects of our business and services.

Sales

Customers are asked to rate our performance over a number of areas, including how quickly we responded to their enquiries, how helpful and knowledgeable our staff were, whether we provided information in a clear and manageable way and whether our team continued to provide help throughout the sales process.

Quality and Preparation of Units and/or Catering Equipment

Customers were asked questions surrounding the condition of temporary kitchens and/or catering equipment they had hired from PKL when it arrived, whether it was as described in our sales process and whether it was reliable during the period of their hire.

Delivery and Installation

Respondents were asked to rate whether their delivery was on time, whether our drivers were helpful and knowledgeable and whether PKL complied with customers’ onsite health, safety and environmental protocol.

Operation and Training

Customers were asked to rate the quality of the operating hand books for catering equipment and temporary kitchens that were provided by PKL and how easy it was to follow the information contained within them.

Technical Support

If technical support was required during the hire period, our customers were asked to rate the level of service they received both within business operational hours, and from our 24 hours technical support service if they used the service out of normal working hours, the level of support and service received from our technical support team and whether we were able to fix their problem first time.

Net Promoter Score

In the analysis of NPS, a score of above zero is good and above 50 is excellent, while a score in minus figures would be of cause for concern. We are therefore delighted with an overall Net Promoter Score of 81 for the year, and in our overall feedback scores in each department which has given a satisfaction score of above 96% in each area of our business.
 
We will of course try to improve on these scores over the coming year and are continually looking at ways in which we are able to improve both our products and levels of service to you. We welcome your feedback at any time, either by emailing us at postbox@pkl.co.uk or phoning 0845 840 42 42.

Once again, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to fill out our customer feedback forms over the last year, and letting us know your thoughts and comments regarding the products and service that you have received from PKL. I will leave you finally with some of the comments that we have received from our customers over the last year.

Customer Quotes

"Have always used PKL as you provide exactly what I need when asked."
 
"A very helpful process for our client. Flexibility was a key part of this hire – Thank you."
 
"Excellent company in all aspects. Thank you for your support to our organisation."
 
"Particularly grateful for the professional and coordinated response from sales and finance together."
 
"Found PKL to be professional. They maintained contact throughout the agreement and were very helpful."
 
"Totally happy with service from start to finish. Machinery very reliable and customer services spot on. Many thanks for your service. Will not hesitate to use PKL again in the future if ever the situation arose."
 
"Consultant was Daniel Robinson – who was great."

"Great! Couldn’t believe how quick you were able to get it here."

Help measure the state of the nation’s school kitchens

Are your school’s kitchen facilities up to the job? Here at PKL, we are helping the Children’s Food Trust to carry out the first national survey of school kitchens across the country.

They are hoping the survey will provide them with information on a number of issues facing school food provision, enabling them to help more schools across the country with their tailored advice.

The Children's Food Trust are gathering information by asking a few short questions covering a number of topics. Are school kitchens big enough and modern enough to cope with feeding hundreds of children every day? Are schools having to allocate valuable budget for repairs and maintenance to ageing kitchens or equipment? Would schools benefit from more information on funding options to replace or improve their kitchen facilities?

To fill out the Children's Food Trust's quick survey to help them gather this vital information, click here and please encourage other school business managers to do the same before Wednesday 17th July.

Read why the Children’s Food Trust wants to see more support for schools to improve kitchens on their blog, and don’t forget they can help if your school is struggling with its kitchen facilities or food provision.

PKL Donates £6000 to the Children's Food Trust

Following the Olympic Games last summer, we went through our catering equipment hire stock and allocated a number of items to be sold off, which were surplus to our ongoing requirements. We’ve made this surplus equipment available at great prices through our Mid West Catering Equipment division, enabling caterers to buy quality, second hand equipment at a fraction of the RRP.

As you may already know, we pledged to make a donation to the Children’s Food Trust for every piece of kit sold, and I handed over our first cheque back in January, which was for a massive £8000.

Following on from this, I’m pleased to announce that I presented donation number two - a cheque for £6000 - to Rob Rees, Chairman of the Children's Food Trust last week.

Rob said: “We’re delighted PKL has supported us with another donation. The Trust’s work in encouraging more children, schools and parents around the country to have a positive experience with food is hugely important. This will help us reach more schools and more children in 2013.”

The Children's Food Trust is a national charity which aims to get children eating better, and its work includes developing healthy school menus and cooking skills with children. I’m very proud that PKL is able to support this charity, as they do a huge amount of work on improving children’s eating habits and, through this, encouraging children to reach their potential.

I look forward to PKL continuing to work with the Children's Food Trust to further support their excellent work.

New Mini Triton Kitchens

Having seen the popularity of our large 3-unit Triton kitchens with my clients, I suggested we develop more in our portfolio to make them available to a wider range of sectors and institution sizes.

Having developed the idea further with a team of colleagues, the new products are now a reality, so I am pleased to introduce our new 3-unit Mini Triton kitchens and 4-unit Mini Triton Plus kitchens! These temporary kitchens are a smaller, budget-friendly alternative to the larger Tritons.

The new 3 or 4-unit temporary kitchens offer all the benefits of the big Tritons, but have a reduced footprint, enabling them to fit onto smaller sites where the standard Tritons would be too large.

They offer the same separation of kitchen areas for good catering practice, and are ideal for medium sized institutional applications, such as for medium to large sized hotels, small hospitals and school refurbishments.

The Mini Tritons are quick to assemble on site, and their smaller size means that two units can be transported per lorry, minimising transport (and transport costs!) and offering a lower carbon footprint.

Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like a chat about whether our new Mini Tritons might offer a suitable solution for your requirements.

Plan views of the Mini Triton and Mini Triton Plus kitchens

How PKL can help with your event

In this post, Dan from our Events team blogs about some of our events experience and why you should consider using PKL for temporary kitchens and catering equipment at your event.

Organising an event can be quite a daunting experience! To make your event a success, there are a huge number of things you’ll need to consider and suppliers you’ll need to deal with.

On top of this, you only get one chance to get it right, so organising any areas you’re unsure about can be risky. The organisation of temporary catering facilities can be one of those areas, and getting this part wrong could be disastrous and leave you in trouble with your caterers, guests and even the authorities if not done properly.

Don’t worry though – as a member of the Events team at PKL, I know the kind of challenges you’ll be up against and I have plenty of experience in offering advice and supplying temporary catering facilities and catering equipment to all sorts of different events.
So, that’s one less thing you need to worry about!

Don’t just take my word for it though. Here’s a list of a few ways in which we can help, showing exactly why you should consider using PKL for temporary kitchens at your event. 

Proven Experience
We have over 20 years’ experience in providing temporary kitchens and catering equipment for events throughout the UK and around the world. In fact, PKL has been doing this since before I was born!

I regularly work to supply catering equipment and facilities to festivals, sporting events, conferences, exhibitions, product launches and pop up restaurants amongst others, for both front and back of house facilities. Recent projects I’ve worked on have included temporary kitchens for a number of locations at Frieze Art Fair, catering equipment for back of house use at the Brit Awards and pop up kitchens for the 'Last Supper Club' event in London. Last summer, PKL also provided 150 separate temporary kitchens for venues, back of house, public and hospitality catering at London 2012.

Equipment and Flexibility
We have the widest range of commercial, bulk and specialist catering equipment available in Europe with over 9,000 items in our hire fleet. This enables us to provide flexible solutions to meet your requirements, so whether you’re planning a standard menu for a large number of people or a bespoke menu for a specialist pop up restaurant, I can help plan a temporary catering facility and provide commercial equipment that is right for you.

For large scale catering, our panless kitchen solution using Gastronorm compatible ovens, refrigeration equipment, hot cupboards and servery equipment is often an ideal solution. We also have specialist facilities which I can advise you on, which enable us to construct temporary kitchens within existing buildings or inside marquees safely and in a compliant way.

Innovative Kitchen Design
Clients often approach us with weird and wonderful ideas for new event kitchen concepts. These have resulted in some of my favourite hires, so whether your temporary kitchen needs to be on top of a busy shopping centre or in Victorian tunnels underground, our experienced in-house design team are up for the challenge! Our kitchen designers can work with you to provide a facility that fits your needs and menu, and the requirements of your chosen location.

Preparation, Delivery and Installation
All our equipment goes through rigorous testing and inspection before each hire, as the last thing you want is for your kitchen to become inoperable during your event! Each item of equipment is put through a commissioning process and quality assurance check, and our temporary kitchens undergo a 30 stage pre-delivery inspection.

Our in-house transport team and engineers are vastly experienced in delivering and installing kitchen solutions, not only in the UK, but around the world. Our engineers hold a wealth of health and safety accreditations to ensure your kitchen is installed in a safe and compliant manner.

Technical Support
We understand that often there’s only one chance to get it right at an event, and operations can’t stop for any reason. To make sure your event runs smoothly, all our equipment and kitchens come backed with 24 hour technical support, and we can also offer the services of a 'babysitting engineer' to stay on site at your event if required.

Help in Specifying Other Products
Sometimes, you might require more than just catering facilities, and although we don’t supply them directly, I can help you source water and waste, marquees, furniture, power generators and gas. Our 25 years supplying event kitchens means that PKL has a vast knowledge of the industry so I can also recommend suppliers for many different aspects of your event if you are struggling for ideas on where to go.

Some PKL Poetry

As it's World Poetry Day today, we thought we'd try and impress you with some attempts at witty rhyme. It turns out that nothing rhymes with "kitchen" though, so that made the task slightly more challenging..!

If you are redoing your kitchen
Get temporary facilities from us in!
With our expertise
We can do it with ease
With minimal hassle and fussin’!

If you need a permanent solution
Our Cubes are a fine contribution.
Our Pods are great too
(And we’ve sold quite a few!) -
They’re something of a revolution!

If you’re catering for an event
Run your kitchen from inside a tent!
If you’ve made the commitment,
We’ve got the equipment
All you need to do’s pay the rent!

If you need our kitchens worldwide,
Fear not, because we can provide
Our kitchens everywhere –
We'll just ship them there!
We know that you’ll be satisfied.

5 ways PKL can ease your hospital kitchen problems

In this post, John Steward, Manager of our Long Term Hire Division, blogs about our temporary hospital kitchens.

As PKL’s hospital kitchen hire specialist, I have extensive experience of arranging temporary kitchen hires for hospitals. There are many reasons why a hospital may require temporary kitchen facilities, such as during planned refurbishments or emergencies such as fire or flood.

Kitchen facilities play a vital role in hospitals and I know the unique set of challenges faced by hospitals requiring temporary facilities. With that in mind, I’ve addressed the top 5 challenges and concerns that hospitals often come to us with when they need temporary kitchen facilities.

I hope this post will give you an insight into how we can help hospitals. Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss your requirements of if you’d like me to prepare a free bespoke kitchen contingency plan for you.

1.    Specialist Kitchen Facilities
From my experience working within the acute care hospital sector, I know that many hospital kitchens have to produce food to specific dietary requirements. The exact facilities required can vary from hospital to hospital, and is vitally important for the health and wellbeing of patients.

We have a fleet of over 10,000 items of catering equipment and can work closely with hospital catering teams and dietary staff to provide each hospital with a temporary kitchen facility which is matched with the menu requirements. In the past, our specialist facilities have included temperature-controlled prep areas for the preparation of high risk meals, as well as facilities for the sterilisation of crocks and utensils.

2.    Noise and Disruption on Site
No hospital wants teams of shouting workmen on site, mess and dirt everywhere or roads blocked for hours on end. That sounds like a nightmare to me too, so you’ll be pleased to know that we have polite, efficient drivers and engineers who are able to deliver our units at times to suit you, including evenings or weekends if preferred. We also plan delivery and installation in advance, which means our experienced team can get facilities installed quickly and efficiently, causing minimum disruption on site.
 
3.    Quality and Reliability
When your staff and patients are relying on kitchen facilities to keep them well-fed, you’ll want to be sure that these facilities aren’t going to let you down. Not only are our kitchens purpose-built units designed specifically for catering use, they also contain commercial catering equipment which consists of trusted, professional brands. All units and items of equipment undergo thorough, regular maintenance to prevent breakdowns, and we can also supply our facilities with back-up generators which will kick in should power be lost, keeping the kitchen running without disruption.

4.    Safety and Compliance
New clients often have questions about the suitability and safety aspects of portable kitchens, so here’s the info you need to know. Our kitchens are manufactured to the highest standard and incorporate the latest health and safety features. Features include a ventilation canopy, auto gas shut off, automatic fire suppression system, easy clean extraction system, infestation-proof construction, 500 lux lighting level, food-safe plastisol steel wall lining, non-slip safety flooring, and insulated fire regulated wall panels, ceilings and floors. Our kitchens also have food-safe wipe clean walls and stainless steel catering equipment, providing a hygienic, easy to clean food preparation environment.

5.    Support and Service
I know that hospital kitchens are used from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, so we offer a level of service to support this. Our service and technical support lines are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and we can dispatch an engineer immediately should a kitchen emergency occur. Additionally, an engineer will be with you within 24 hours of all standard service callouts, and any minor matters will be attended to as soon as we have an engineer in the area.