A Message to Our Partners Regarding the Latest COVID-19 Situation

We hope you are safe, well and made the most of this past weekend. Obviously, the news of the second lockdown was not what we wanted to hear. Like you we are reviewing government advice and are planning to the best of our ability with the information we have around us. As we work as a community to prepare for the impact of the national lockdown, we wanted to share how i247 are addressing the current situation. Our focus >  The health and safety of our colleagues and partners is our primary concern. We are taking a number of measures to ensure we safely navigate our way through this second lockdown. Please feel free to ask for further information on the steps we are taking to protect the health and wellbeing of our colleagues and their families. Business Continuity > In recent months we have extended our business continuity programs ‘WFH’ capabilities and have tested in advance of this current situation to ensure that we could operate securely from distributed locations for as long as necessary. A core team of customer service agents will continue to work from our Poole based HQ spread socially distanced across the available office space. Meantime our remaining colleagues who are able or wishing to work from home have been provided access to ‘work from home kits’ enabling them to continue to work in a safe environment. Your services > We know thousands of your vehicles depend on the essential services we provide, and we take this responsibility seriously. Consequently, we will be maintaining our range of services and our products are fully operational at this moment in time. It’s business as usual (albeit far from usual circumstances).  Challenges ahead > We are monitoring the situation closely, currently closures within the dealer / garage / tyre network are very limited with a large majority indicating they will remain open to service business as usual requirements. We will continue to engage with partners across the network landscape to identify impacts. Insight suggests if the public stop moving, we can expect some short-term network rationalisation, resulting furlough might impact capacity across the network however we need to take each day at a time.  Recommendations > As many of our services support key workers / business critical fleets / the vulnerable we know vehicles will continue to be relied upon. We also know from our experiences over the first lockdown customers will be confused and looking for support. Proactive messaging is key. During this time of uncertainty, we will do everything we can to support you communicate effectively with your customer base. With our systems holding white labelled broadcasting capabilities (across SMS and mailshot) please feel free to engage with us if you would like to explore proactive broadcasting campaigns across your driver base. Outlook > These are challenging and uncertain times, but we are confident that as a company and community, we can continue to get through this together. We remain positive we are in a strong position and can quickly respond to changing government advice / market trends, minimising impacts to our business and disruptions to your services and customers. Should the situation change, we will of course update you. We encourage people to get in touch with us over the upcoming days, weeks, if there are any challenges we can assist with please let us know and we’ll look to support to the best of our capability. Stay safe, stay positive i247 #bettertogther #wedo