Category • Customer Resources

Total Care vs Essential Service plans – what’s right for my workplace?

Alex | July 2, 2022

If you’re thinking about getting a coffee machine or water dispenser for your workplace, you’ll want to ensure you have a reliable and effective service plan. Service plans are important to ensure your commercial appliances stay up and running. Most office coffee machine and water providers will offer various levels of care. In our case, we offer two service plans for our customers. We offer an Essentials package alongside a more comprehensive plan called Total Care. We take a look at each of them and discuss both reactive and proactive care and which is right for you.

Why do I need a service plan?

Firstly, let’s look at what a service plan is. Put simply, a service plan is a contract. They’re offered by lots of companies so the consumer gets a number of services for a set cost over a set period of time. Depending on what service plan you choose, you’ll pay a subscription type fee. This will mean that if anything goes wrong, you’re covered by your plan. Service plans are different from warranties. Whenever you purchase a high ticket item, you tend to get a warranty with it. In the case of a coffee machine or water dispenser, a warranty will keep them covered for manufacturing faults only. Warranties tend to run for around a year or so, so after this period if anything goes wrong, you’re on your own.

Warranties are not ideal for office settings which is why we at FreshGround offer our Essentials service plans as standard.

Essentials Service Plan

You can look at our Essentials plan as reactive maintenance. By this, we mean, we’ll come out if anything goes wrong so if there’s a fault, we’ll fix it. This doesn’t include accidental damage or lack of care. Any proactive level of care is excluded.

In this case, you find yourself in a position where something has gone wrong or broken so your machine needs attention. At this point, your machine won’t be functioning well or at all leaving you without access to freshly brewed coffee to fuel your workforce. Any office or facilities manager will know that coffee and water are vital to keeping your office functioning well. They both help to keep the team happy and hydrated.

Coffee is also associated with boosting creativity and productivity at work. Plus it’s also reported that quality coffee helps to support your workplace culture along with talent acquisition and retention. So the question is, do you want to wait until something goes wrong? Or would you rather put in place plans to prevent things from going wrong in the first place? This is where our Total Care package comes in.

Total Care plan

Total Care offers our customers complete peace of mind. It’s a fully inclusive service package, combining fantastic extras into a convenient and cost-effective bundle to compliment your rental contract. It includes planned preventative maintenance every six months on all machines to reduce any downtime. We also provide full filtration management to keep the drinks flowing.

Total Care is our proactive maintenance plan so we can do our best to stop things from going wrong. Many issues are preventative so regularly maintaining your machines is important. Our team also provide full training and support on how to operate, clean and maintain the machine/water tap. This package is our most comprehensive and it’s why nearly three-quarters of our customer base opt for this level of cover.

Customer service

Customer service is at the heart of what we do and we pride ourselves on giving a fantastic level of care. All our customers, regardless of what plan you choose, have access to our dedicated client care team. It’s also worth noting that the team are all Speciality Coffee Association trained, so we certainly know our stuff when it comes to coffee and coffee machines.

If we didn’t supply your coffee machine or water dispenser, we can still provide a service and maintenance plan for you. It doesn’t matter where you got it from, as long as its a brand we service, such as Jura, Billi, Zip, Cimbali or Egro, we can probably take a look at it for you. Just contact us if you’d like to find out more.

What’s best for me?

To understand the differences between our Essentials Plan and Total Care to work out what’s best for you, we’ve put together this helpful table. And of course, if you need any help in making your decision, simply get in touch with our friendly team.