A 24/7 support and monitoring desk
6,784 hours in year one, 6,000+ cold-room alerts, 1,900+ invoices, now in year three
A London commercial-kitchen group. A long-established London company that rents commercial kitchens, cold rooms, offices and storage to food businesses across about ten sites.
The challenge
Tenants need help at any hour. Cold rooms full of other people’s stock can fail at 3am. Fire alarms, lifts, leaks, access fobs and deliveries all need a fast response. The client was paying a call-answering service by the minute and was not happy with how out-of-hours calls were handled.
What we did
- Started with weekend cover in May 2024, and went live with a full team two weeks later.
- In the first week, analysed 500 of the client’s support emails and built an FAQ to train the team.
- Took over tenant tickets and phones, then added cold-room monitoring and engineer call-outs, contractor dispatch, emergency procedures, purchase-ledger entry, debtor calls and fit-out logging.
- Wrote the playbook: an “if-then” routing guide by issue and priority, a cold-room procedure and a 16-page agent handbook.
- Moved to full 24/7 cover in three 8-hour shifts.
- Two years on, the team also cross-checks the hours of the client’s cleaning and night teams against their invoices, and recommends new roles as the operation grows.
The results
6,784 hours
of support delivered
May 2024 to April 2025
6,000+ cold-room alerts
handled: temperature, door-switch and power failures
May 2024 to April 2025
1,400 temperature alerts
handled in a single month at peak
July 2025
1,900+ invoices
from suppliers, entered into the ledger
May 2024 to April 2025
Under 1 hour
average response and resolution time during working hours
May 2024 to April 2025
Year three
and the desk is still running
Since May 2024
Who did what
Our people
- Answered tenant tickets and phones around the clock, in three 8-hour shifts.
- Monitored the cold rooms, handled the alerts (temperature, door-switch and power failures) and called out engineers.
- Entered supplier invoices into the ledger and made the debtor calls.
- Checked the hours of the cleaning and night teams against their invoices.
The tools
- An FAQ, built from the client’s own support emails, trained the team.
- A written playbook set out what to do: an “if-then” routing guide, a cold-room procedure and a 16-page agent handbook.
The lesson we build into every account
When an urgent email was missed for 15 minutes in July 2026, we treated it as a process gap, not a people problem, and fixed it the same day: a second screen for every on-shift agent, a rule to acknowledge urgent emails within 10 minutes and a clear priority order. The fix is a routine, not a person.
What the client said
- On the first week’s data analysis, “This is so interesting, thank you.”
- The account manager compared the team’s efficiency over the holidays to “FBI agents”.
- On our debtor calls: “Already doing a great job.”