Big Interview: Putting Their Customers First – The Success Of CVP

With over 25 years' experience in the business, it's clear to see CVP's passion for the Cine, Video and Photo industry. Taking the hot seat for our Big Interview, Dominic Smye-Rumsby, Technical Services Manager, discusses just what sets them apart from the competition...

Q: What is at the core of CVP's technical services?

A: Our support staff – ranging from technical support engineers, who will be happy to find and supply the answer to our customers most complex questions, third-party administrators who will manage every step of a repair directly with the supplier, and our in-house engineers who will turn around a repair in the quickest and most cost-effective way – all know what is required to provide our customers with the easiest and smoothest customer experience within the industry.

At CVP we pride ourselves on a value add service, we invest hundreds of thousands of Euro every year ensuring that we have the most diverse and reactive technical services team in the industry. This, we feel makes us stand head and shoulders above the rest, and with our manufacturer-awarded Authorised Service Centre status' our suppliers seem to recognise this also.

Q: What are the typical services that the Engineering department provide to the CVP customer base?

First and foremost engineering repairs, whether it be manufacturer approved warranty or chargeable. Operating out of our base in Brentford, our repair facility, which has grown with the business over the past 15 years, started out with a single engineer and an administrator. Our engineering repairs have now developed into six full time engineers, each with their own unique skills including; camera and decks; lenses, mechanics and tripods; audio and wireless and storage and editing.

Our camera and deck engineers are manufacturer trained and some are even ex-manufacturer engineers specialising in the repair, maintenance and technical support of the vast majority of the products that we sell. They have a depth of knowledge that is almost impossible to train and as a result they maintain strong relationships with our suppliers.

Lens, mechanics and tripods are a relative new engineering venture for CVP, however, our engineers are far from new; with over 20 years of lens and mechanical engineering experience there is little that our engineers cannot repair. Over the past year we have invested considerably in our lens facility with a dedicated lens workshop. We have been recognised and supported by Zeiss, Fuji and Canon as having the capabilities to repair and service lenses, and we also have the privilege to be the only authorised Angenieux repair centre in the UK.

Q: Which categories, manufacturers and products do CVP support?

There is a support path for all our products. With over 3,000 suppliers we know the support route for each and every one of them, we have to! Regarding categories, as you can see from our website we split these up into three key areas; Cine, Video, Photo. Okay this maybe a little trick on our initials but it still is the main focus of our business. However drilling further down into these three categories we support Cinematography, Video, Photo, Audio, Studio, Editing and Computing.

Throughout these we have manufacturer recognised statuses that includes Sony Authorised Service Centre status, where we are the only UK service centre who covers every product category, Avid ACSR, one of two Vitec (Tripods) Service centres and Panasonic Service Centre status. With these approvals we can also carry out approved warranty repairs, reducing downtime for our customers, which includes Sony PrimeSupport repairs.

Q: CVP seem to be stocking an ever-increasing range of products across Broadcast, Cinematography, DSLR, video, etc. How do you keep up?

As already mentioned, we have over 3,000 suppliers and 70,000 products. It is a mammoth task to support, however we somehow manage to do it. We know that this will continue to increase as we broaden our range further and the way that we keep up is by strong communication, not only with our suppliers but also with ourselves. As a company we ensure that we continually share information between ourselves; we have various internal communication methods ensuring that everyone has access or knows how to access the information required. We never sit back and think that we know it all – we can and always will improve our knowledge and find better and more efficient ways of communicating it.

As and when we find or introduce a new product, support is always at the forefront. We will always confirm the support mechanism offered by our suppliers and if we can improve this for our customers we always will. From time to time some of our suppliers will provide us with additional training when required especially when new technology is involved. Most of the time this training is provided via e-learning but as our relationship with the vast majority of our suppliers is very good we get privileged access to support documents on the bulk of products, providing our engineers with the necessary tools and skill sets.

Q: What are the technological challenges in providing Engineering services, and what are the most common problems encountered?

Every repair is a technological challenge these days. Most repairs no longer require component level repair and now just require the correct board to be replaced. This in itself sounds relatively easy, however it is often far from it. With digital circuits nowadays every board talks to each other and there are trillions of processes happening every second. A fault that appears to be the same as the last one could easily now be caused by a completely different board. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) or Tiny Computers, which I am sure you have heard about from Sony, ARRI and Panasonic recently, are a signal chip that now do the same job that several boards used to do. We have to reprogram these devices on a daily basis in order to provide our customers with up to date fixes and features of their latest product.

The most common problems that we encounter are not down to a product failure themselves; it is actually down to human error. We see physically broken units all the time, products that have been dropped, run over or sunk. We also see damage caused by lasers or even the pet dog. Most of these repairs are easy and in the vast majority of cases we can repair the product back to the manufacturers' original specification and reinstating our customers warranty just in case the product does fail in the future.

Q: What are your development plans for customer service in the future, and what challenges do you face in achieving your goals?

To continue to expand and develop in order to provide our customers with a completely unique customer service experience. We are in the process of doubling our engineering space to expand further on our engineering and lens repair capabilities, and to offer our customers a further enhanced testing facility that can be utilised for new and existing products. Our challenges are obviously cost, as with any company. If we had an infinite cash flow, then our development could progress faster and further, however things take time, which is not always a bad thing, as it allows us to learn from our experiences and mature and evolve a successful continuous development plan.

www.cvp.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online.