THE ERT INTERVIEW ASWO


The ASWO UK head office in Coventry


Q: What are your plans to develop the service? RW: At the moment we’ve got about 400 partners, so there’s plenty of space for more. We’ve actually been talking about Repair Parts Team for a while and the applications have trickled in already, and that’s allowed us to get dealers on board gradually. Once it’s all completely live we do expect a bit of a boom. But we want people to know about ASWO as a whole, including our Repair Parts Team service. I think most of our growth in the UK has come from word of mouth which has been helped by attending various industry events.


16 As a wholesaler, we are able to completely remove


ourselves from the retail margin and pass on whatever is left over after shipping and other costs. At the end of the day, the retailer would have made that margin if the customer bought the product in store, so we believe it’s important that they still get this through Repair Parts Team. Our aim is to assist the repair industry in our own little way, particularly the smaller independent dealers that offer a mix of sales and servicing. Whatever we can do to help them ultimately helps us.


Q: What sort of reaction have you had so far to this new offering? RW: We took this concept to the Sirius Buying Group Trade Show back in September, and the dealers we saw were so enthusiastic about it, they absolutely loved it. We had a queue of members wanting to speak to us – it was quite unbelievable and the word-of- mouth so far has been helped us expand. And once it’s fully up and running, our plan is to talk to all the independents that have got their own


websites so they can link to our site and this will help with organic growth of the service.


Some ASWO customers are aware of this new service already; right in the middle of trade website homepage there’s a banner for Repair Parts Team which leads to a short application. We’ll gather a bit of information from the retailer and they need to tell us if they’re a collection point or a repair-only service; for example, we’ll never send a customer to an engineer’s private property to collect a part.


Q: When will Repair Parts Team go live? RW: We’ve got a target of April 2023. As you can imagine, behind the scenes this is a very complex service with so many things to consider, but our teams have been fantastic getting us to where we are now. We have got some analytics running at the moment based on people searching by postcode for repairers and we’re tracking the results from that; we need to make sure that we’re getting national coverage and that we’re sending useful, genuine leads to retailers and repairers up and down the country.


And we are continuing our innovation with another product which is hopefully due for launch this year, called ProtechNeed (Professional Technician you Need), which is connecting repairs to the manufacturers to try and bridge some of the needs of the manufacturers, but also send some valuable repair work to the repairers.


Q: How does this all fit in with today’s green agenda and the increasingly hot topic of sustainability in the electrical industry? RW: With the Right to Repair bill that’s come in I can only see that appliances are definitely going to be built to be repairable to last longer. If you can put a new belt on a washing machine so it works for another 10 years, you are saving the life of that appliance and that’s a huge benefit for both the consumer and the environment. It might not be music to retailers’ ears, but truthfully we’ve got to think about the resources that are needed to make brand new appliances, and the waste that is created when old ones are thrown away.


It is a real focus for the whole industry right


now and it’s the principle of keeping independent repairers alive, which is what Repair Parts Team is all about, which in turn is one of ASWO’s fundamentals and contributes towards the wider goal of keeping electrical products working for longer.


February 2023 ertonline.co.uk


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