Due to the Corona precautionary regulations, various adjustments to the usual work processes were necessary. Already planned trips had to be cancelled or postponed and visits to customers are hardly possible in the foreseeable future. Even the leading trade fair for the metal packaging industry, METPACK in Essen, which was already in the hot phase, had to be postponed from May 2020 to February 2021.
It is extremely important to us to ensure the supply of spare parts and the availability of our technical support, thus providing our customers, most of whom are classified as systemically relevant, with the best possible support, especially in times of crisis. For this reason, we are now offering a 10% discount on wear parts in particularly high demand.
On the other hand, we want to maintain the operational readiness of our customers' equipment as comprehensively as possible, even without the arrival of a service technician. For this reason, our customers now receive up to 9 months free support via remote maintenance, telephone hotline and the interactive live video assistant Visual Line Support when concluding a Remote Service contract. Through this new interactive live video tool, our remote maintenance specialists have exactly the same view of machine as the customer and thus can provide optimum assistance and instructions to analyse and rectify problems. At the same time, the customer can communicate directly with the remote specialists by phone or chat – If a technician visit is unavoidable, Koenig & Bauer MetalPrint can fall back on the global Koenig & Bauer service network and in many cases is able to support our customers directly on site.
Fortunately, we are able to carry out a large part of our work at computer workstations and have set up early on the possibility for most of our employees to work from their home office. Meetings are now held by telephone and increasingly also by video conference, so that direct contact with colleagues is still guaranteed even in the home office. Where this is not yet in place, we already created the technical prerequisites for this in mid-March. This guarantees that our customers can still reach us via the usual communication channels.
