How St Cuthbert's Hospice got two Durham shops trading again in 24 hours

The situation

St Cuthbert's Hospice runs a retail estate across County Durham, and the money those shops take pays for care. Two of the busiest are the shop at Prince Bishops in Durham city and the Meadowfield Furniture and Homeware Store.

Connectivity at the sites had become a problem. One of the shops could not be connected over the fixed network at all. Without a reliable connection, the card terminals were not dependable, and a charity shop that cannot take a card payment is not really open.

The hospice came to Fuse to ask what the options were.

What was at stake

This was not an inconvenience, it was income. Every failed transaction is a donation that does not arrive, and the shops are a direct funding line for patient care. Waiting weeks for a fixed-line answer that had already failed once was not a workable plan.

What Fuse did

  1. Asked what was available, not what was ordered. Rather than putting the same fixed-line request back into the queue, we looked at what would actually serve each address. Mobile coverage at both sites was strong enough to carry retail trading properly.
  2. Specified 5G as the primary connection. Not as a stopgap. The connection was sized for card terminals and staff use so the shops could trade normally, with no dependency on a fixed line that had not been able to serve the site.
  3. Installed and live within 24 hours. Both shops, supplied, installed and working.

The result

Card terminals back on, staff connected, and both shops taking electronic payments again within 24 hours of the go ahead. The income line the hospice depends on was restored rather than left waiting on an installation date.

"Our shops play an important role in generating income to support the care we provide to patients and their families, so ensuring transactions are quick and seamless benefits everyone."

Angela Lord, Sales Manager, Retail and Lottery, St Cuthbert's Hospice

The point

You do not need to own your building, or be a landlord, or be a large business, to have a connectivity problem that costs you real money every day it goes unfixed. If the fixed line cannot serve the site, or cannot serve it in time, that is not the end of the conversation. It is the start of a different one.

Check any UK commercial address free at connect.fusecore.co.uk.