NEWS IN BRIEF...
December 1st 2007 Improvements to customer servicing
The BSIF Directors Club met recently at a luncheon held in the hallowed environment of the Committee Dining room at Lords Cricket Ground, a venue synonymous with fair play and gentlemanly conduct. After the meal, Colin Shaw, a respected guru on customer services, spoke passionately about the need to consider customers and their perception of a supplier from the ways in which they are treated.
The current predilection for impersonal call-centres, machine generated menu responses to telephone calls, insistence that transactions are done ‘on-line’ and the absence of real people in the interactive process were robustly criticised. The subsequent discussion suggests that suppliers of industrial safety products and equipment will be more focused on the fact that they are dealing with people rather than anonymous entities in the future.
The BSIF Directors Club was set up to create a networking forum for safety industry seniors and a platform to encourage an interpersonal contact with other trade bodies and government officials away from the formality of office meetings. The forward plan is to seek to select interesting venues, authoritative speakers and high profile guests for future luncheon events.
If any BSIF member or reader would like to be invited to future luncheons being arranged by the BSIF Directors Club, please contact BSIF Enterprises (details in the contact panel).
Notified Bodies withdraw CE Certificates on PPE
Elsewhere in these pages, we have discussed the problems associated with ‘rogue products’. One of the issues affecting this subject is the incidence of counterfeit markings. The fact that the CE Mark is a legal requirement on any PPE traded within the EU generates a motivation for ‘cheap’ traders to falsify this CE Mark and/or plagiarise a genuine manufacturer's identity . PPE Notified Bodies have decided that if they have specific knowledge regarding where such illegal copying is being practiced, they have an obligation to act to maintain their own integrity.
What is not often realised is that a Notified Body retains ownership of the CE Certificates they issue. Within the UK these NBs are now withdrawing CE Certificates when they have been misused. Whilst NBs are keen not to become embroiled within the enforcement process, this action will have the broad affects desired by bone-fide suppliers since any certificate withdrawal must be advised to the competent authority (BERR in the UK), who are then obliged to advise all other member states through the EU Commission. Many a cynic will assume that this is a protracted process but current experience is that a recent certificate withdrawal was notified to all EU states within 72h. This means that the local equivalents of the HSE will be able to prevent the use of these rogue products and, hopefully, prevent any harm to wearers should the PPE fail to perform.
Development of wider BSIF awards schemes
The success of the BSIF Product Innovation Awards which have been featured at the Safety & Health Expo in recent years and the introduction last year of the Innovative Service Awards have motivated BSIF Enterprises to consider the launch of a series of Awards to recognise supply side innovation in reducing accidents and injuries within client organisations. readers are welcome to comment on what they would like to see included - through the editor please. More articles from British Safety Industry Federation: | 
