Premier delivers the water on demand for TNT

The UK’s leading business-to-business express delivery company, TNT had bottled water coolers installed throughout its nationwide operation more than five years ago.

Employees at TNT, which handles more than 65 million parcels and packages on behalf of UK businesses annually, consume high volumes of water at depots and office locations around the country.

However, the company experienced a dramatic downturn in service levels and standards of customer care from its water cooler supplier in 2005. It became clear the issue was not going to be resolved and TNT began actively seeking an alternative supplier for their chilled water supply requirements.

The TNT Purchasing Department commented: “Towards the end of our agreement with our outgoing supplier, we experienced extremely poor customer service. Deliveries were late, and on a number of occasions did not turn up at all.

“At the same time, when we experienced breakdowns with the water coolers, the engineers were unreliable and did not always turn up. This was not ideal, particularly during the summer months.”

“During the tender exercise for a new service provider, we realised the market was moving towards mains fed water dispensers.”

“It was widely felt that such a move would bring a number of benefits. It would eliminate the delivery problems we had encountered and reduce the health and safety risks of carrying heavy water containers.”

“Furthermore we saw the opportunity of reducing our carbon footprint by cutting vehicle emissions associated with the regular deliveries of bottled water and by not having to send the bottled containers to landfill.”

The partnership has gone from strength to strength and now Premier has water coolers installed in 81 locations for TNT, which adds up to 350 dispensers.

TNT commented: “Premier has effectively implemented a national rollout of water dispensers across a large number of depots and our experience of the company has been more than satisfactory.

“This included Premier being extremely flexible and speeding up their initial installation plans when the incumbent supplier stopped delivering bottles to depots. This ensured minimum impact to the business operation and staff.”

“And the use of mains fed coolers has totally removed the problem of depots running out of water through a problematic supplier.”

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