‘Offering the fruit and vineyard community a fully active and integrated support team has always been the priority of Burden Bros Agri,” so says Andy Page, Sales Executive for the company’s fruit and vineyard division. “Today, that resource is firmly in place and offering its customer base a highly proactive back-up team of fruit and vineyard specialists - unmatched by any other dealer.”

The team consists of three key members, backed-up by fully-trained technicians and parts advisors who ensure that customer needs are promptly fulfilled. Andy Page is the 5 series specialist who’s focus is taking care of customer needs, where they are looking to acquire machinery to carry out establishment, maintenance and harvesting duties, be it in top fruit, stone fruit, vineyard or soft fruit applications.

Support back-up comes from two fully qualified fruit equipment technicians; Tom Carter, based out of the Stockbury branch and Ben Anderson, based out of the Ivychurch branch. With such a high volume of John Deere fruit and vineyard tractors in the region, Burden Bros Agri operate a managed programme where tractor servicing schedules are recorded and planned so that all tractors receive timely servicing schedules to ensure they are maintained in top condition. Where customers might operate ten or more John Deere tractors, the servicing schedule is planned to service several in one visit. The technicians will operate a customer call procedure, checking the achieved hours on tractors and carrying out oil changes or service actions as and when they are due - automatically. At the same time, while they are carrying out service duties on a tractor that requires the service, they will also check the other tractors in the fleet, just in case one or more of the fleets are close to a service call. The specialists carry a range of consumables on-board their truck ideal for any such service call requirement.

“What we are doing to help customers,” commented Tom Carter, “is to site a white-board in the service area on the farm, so that any items that might need checking, can be logged by the operator and assessed by us as technicians on our farm visit. This will maximise the usefulness of our service call. So, for instance if a tractor operator notices a malfunction which the error codes rates as low priority - the operator writes a note on the whiteboard so that when a technician arrives, he deals with that issue and delete’s the notification.”

Added Ben Anderson, “I might be visiting one customer and servicing his tractors and when I have finished, as I am passing a neighbouring farm, I can drop-in and check their fleet making sure that everything is being taken care of. My call could be just to deliver spare parts, but it can be utilised to check the service needs and maximise the visit.”

“Since we established this service, added Andy Page, “we’ve had a lot of positive feedback from customers saying that it reduces pressure on them while they are at their busiest. There’s one more benefit to our service for fruit and vineyard customers - we can also offer the same service, even if you are not using John Deere products. It’s something we have geared-up for that comes as second nature to our team, to provide benefit for our customers.” he concluded.