Customers in cafes, convenience stores, offices, restaurants, and hotels all need the same outcome of their beverage program; a reliable service executed with high quality. They trust coffee equipment made by Concordia to fit this need because our innovations are rooted in a passion to deliver precision results in every cup. We take immense pride in the satisfaction of our customers and have built longstanding relationships with sales reps, vendors, and service professionals who can support our equipment and work with customers to ensure optimal performance.
To help explain the importance of routine daily cleaning to a customer’s bottom line, we enlisted Technical Training Manager Dana Klatt to share his observations on equipment in the field and how customers may be able to prevent costly service bills.
Daily Cleanings can Increase Productivity
As a service professional both in the field and on dispatch duty, Dana troubleshoots a range of technical difficulties that can take significant time and effort to overcome. “The conversation starts with several questions to make sure we get our baseline facts,” Dana says of service phone calls. “Our equipment has a dedicated menu of diagnostic tools to rule out easy fixes or actionable error codes, but sometimes we need to go a step further and send out a technician to diagnose larger issues with components or hydraulic valves.” The minutes, hours, or even days of downtime can quickly add up and impact a customer’s ability to serve beverages or earn revenue. “There is no one size fits all approach to service,” Dana notes, “but I think of the daily cleaning program like investing in basic machine life insurance. We encourage it so customers are less likely to experience interruptions in service down the line.” Concordia coffee equipment operates most effectively with regular use and cleaning; it’s akin to the classic proverb an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
Daily Cleanings make Better Tasting Beverages
The ingredients dispensed by our super automatic coffee machines (milk, coffee, and syrup) are made of several organic compounds that interact with their environment and our machines’ internal components. We also know from consuming these food products the importance of a shelf life of freshness before their flavor qualities can degrade. Every drink made on Concordia coffee equipment relies on precisely engineered mechanical pathways to measure and dispense the exact recipe selected, and buildup of older ingredients will naturally happen over repeated use. “A dirty machine will make a dirty drink,” Dana emphasizes. “If my customer or technician mentions drinks tasting worse over time, my first response is asking when it was last cleaned. Nine times out of ten, the daily cleaning can get the taste back where it belongs.” The step-by-step cleaning process on the XT6 purges and recycles specific chemical cleaners through each system (milk, syrup, and coffee) targeting stale sugars and residues automatically. Adopting a daily cleaning habit means offering every beverage of the highest quality, every day.
Daily Cleanings are Less Expensive than Component Fixes
Although Concordia offers a standard coffee equipment warranty with 24/7 technical support, some things cannot be predicted. Issues can happen to anyone at any time for any number of reasons, which means Dana and the Concordia team need the proper spare parts inventory at the ready in case of emergency. “It’s never fun to identify a necessary or costly replacement,” muses Dana. Despite his reassurance of a resolution, customers facing a large service bill likely feel mixed reactions of relief and confusion as to how the problem originated. “When we need to issue a replacement, it means one of several things may have been happening to the coffee equipment, but unfortunately we were too late to prevent them.” Dana is quick to point out daily cleaning is a form of preventative maintenance where an ounce of prevention can equal a pound of cure. “We try to make it as easy as possible for folks to perform their own ‘service’ should they want total control of quality. The cleaning supplies are inexpensive, the steps are easy to follow, and the whole process should take no more than ten minutes at the end of the day.” In the long run, the low investment in money and time saves customers the potential cost of replacing entire components due to premature failure.
The instructions for cleaning Concordia’s AT and XT can be found on our blog posts here and here, and our OEM cleaning kits are available for purchase anytime on PartsTown. NOTE: Before attempting service by yourself, we strongly recommend contacting your service provider first to review their technical notes specific to your coffee equipment.
