Transcript

So yeah, hello, this, I’ve done this presentation before and it’s doing it now.

It automatically scrolls, so I’ll be backwards and forwards in on it because it likes to do this.

So yeah, Louise kindly let me use her strap line from last year’s thing, just because we thought it was quite appropriate.

So I’ll actually be talking more about delivering a digital garden waste service.

So this is my third time delivering a chargeable garden we service, but the first time delivering a wholly sort of digital all-encompassing service.

So we have 185,000 households and for this service we assumed a participation of 150 households.

We’re a unitary authority and answer is our wholly owned council environmental services company and they deliver all of our environmental services.

So like street cleansing and everything like that.

For us, our garden waste is commingled with food waste and that is for people who subscribe only.

So we checked that with Defra and they were OK with that.

This was pre any announcements that came out.

The reason we did it was because the council has experienced increased costs and we needed to generate 4,000,000 lbs in income to fill a big hole.

And now I’m pressing it and it took it well.

It actually took seven months to develop all the systems and the PR and start the subscriptions from start to finish.

So our vision for the service was that we wanted a totally digital system with minimal interaction from staff.

Because we have a really small team.

We wanted welcome emails to customers who subscribed permits for subscribers and we wanted absolutely no direct debits.

And whilst we weren’t averse to continuous payments, we didn’t want them in our first year.

So our service working period is January to December and we made the decision that we would not be collecting in any old bins.

We would leave them all out there.

And like I already said, seven months to implement.

The deadline for implementation was the 31st of September and that was with me being told start of March.

And then as you can see, we knew we wanted a strong branding for the service which is all over these slides because we really wanted to sell the service to people.

It was we knew that we were going to be at 56 lbs or upwards for our subscription charge and we do do a 25% discount for those on eligible benefits.

We only had one neighbouring authority who did chargeable garden waste and their charge was I think 40 at the time and all our other surrounding local authorities didn’t charge.

So we were in a unique situation.

I’m going the wrong way again.

So this is we have Bartek as our in cab system.

And so we spoke with Bartek about their customer portal.

So as part of this whole project, we implemented the customer portal so that people could subscribe to our garden.

We service online easily.

And this is, this is what our portal looks like.

When they, when they log into the portal, they can see all of their collections.

So not just garden waste, so they can see, they know when they all are.

That’s really useful for them.

We’ve had a lot of feedback about the portal that people really like it.

They could see how many subscriptions they’ve got.

They can see any miss bins they’ve reported and shortly they’ll be able to book a slot for our household waste sites on here as well.

These are our so that one there is our permit which is green.

Pay attention to the green for the final slide.

And we’ve had ours all logoed up with all our designs.

Our thought process is that not only will we change the colour every year, we will change the we will pick another bit of our design and add that in as well.

And then this is the permissive portal which shows us all sorts of different graphs and participation and everything like that.

We did two, I’ve been like taking notes while people have been asking questions.

So I can tell you we did two leaflets to all households, one in September and then another one in March.

So our subscriptions went live on the 1st of October 2023 and the service started on the 15th of January 24.

So they had sort of two reminders about it plus all associated social media and all of that sort of stuff.

Our so our customer services contact centre didn’t require any extra staff.

We offered them money but they had to request the money from us.

So we kept hold of it and they didn’t require any more staff.

However, formal complaints that go through to my team went up by 51% and I can tell you most of those were people asking how on earth were we able to charge them when they already paid for their bin collections through their councils tax.

That was the majority of of the complaints we got.

So my advice would be make sure you know you’ve got an already scripted response to that because it saves time.

Our replacement permits are at about 2%.

So that confirms what Louise just said.

And for the first two weeks when we went live, the crews not only checked the permits, they also checked the in cab system to make sure whether people had a subscription but just hadn’t either got their permit or hadn’t stuck it on the bin.

It was really worthwhile because we didn’t get a lot of complaints and people were quite happy.

But I can say you wouldn’t be able to do that long term for those two weeks.

It really slowed the cruise down.

For bins that are put out after that without a permit, they get a sticker with AQR code that basically promotes the service.

So it’s a positive message.

We went with a positive message rather than a negative message to start off with.

Yeah, we didn’t do any early bird fee.

I’ve said we don’t do direct debits.

It was interesting.

So we have a mix of garden waste bins out there that are two 40s and one 40s.

So we didn’t want to stop the two, the one 40s because we felt that was not fair to sort of elderly residents or people that just wanted a smaller bin.

However, we did make the decision that we would charge the same price regardless of the size of your bin.

And we’ve answered that when people ask us by going, well, you’re paying for the service, not the size of the bin.

And we don’t really get much pushback about that.

Have really good TS and CS.

Our TS and CS are really thorough.

I also got our legal team to check them as well.

And I can’t, I’ve lost count in the amount of times when our TS and CS have allowed us to respond to a customer in a way that means we’re not sort of we can push back on things that they’re asking for.

So we, we have in our TS and CS that if they have three MIS collection, 3 continuous MIS collections and they reported all those MIS collections, we would consider a partial refund.

So, so far, Touchwood, we’ve actually not had that occurrence.

We have lots of people, they have one Misbin and they’re like, that’s it, I want a refund.

So that bit in the teaser and then we just tell people, go back to your TS and CS.

We did have one person questioning a bit of our TS and CS and sort of threat saying, Oh well, I know this isn’t legally right and this is I’m going to take you to court.

But because our legal team were already fully aware and had approved the TS and CS, I was just able to go to them and they gave me like a statement that we sent to the customer.

When the customer pushed back on that, legal literally just replied with it, OK, we’ll see you in court.

And then it just surprisingly went quiet after that.

So our engagement through the portal has been about 85 to 90%.

So online subscriptions, our customer services have what we call the agent portal.

So if someone calls up and really can’t use the online service, the agents, the customer service advisors go into the agent portal & them up and then it diverts them to pay 360 where the customer pays privately and then it it all lines up.

So basically when they subscribe through the portal that literally it updates the CRM for customer services, it updates the crew routes and it also tells permissive that a permit’s required.

So it’s all kind of, it just works without us really doing anything, which thank goodness, don’t offer.

Oh yeah.

So we also have had the issue of, like, people saying, well, leaves from your tree fall on our garden or, well, I’ve been cutting this council hedge for like 20 years, but now I want you to give me a free bin.

So our answer is like, no.

So that’s it.

No more discussions and we’ve been firmer, but we have had quite a bit of that.

We don’t do any part year discounts.

Oh, and when So we did a lot of well answer, did a lot of training with the crews.

They did several sessions running up to the go live.

We gave them copies of the permit so they knew what colour they were looking for, what style were they looking for?

They’ve had the TS and CS, they’ve had all the artwork, and the crews were given really clear instructions on what to do, what not to do.

So they knew what they were doing.

We got really good engagement with the crews.

I have to say they were brilliant.

Like they’ve really sort of taken this up, which having been an operational manager, that is sometimes unusual, but they really bought into this and really wanted to do well.

So that was really good.

And that is something that I would say if you’ve got time, do that.

I’m just looking at my notes to see if there’s anything else I wrote down.

Oh, the other thing is from some prior experience of introducing a chargeable garden waste system before we went live, we devised an e-mail address for to put on our own formal complaints that and to send from that was basically a not repliable e-mail address.

So if the customer replied to that e-mail address, they would get a message saying this is not monitored, please go back through our SO.

And that has turned out to be essential because before it was up and running, we’re getting people just coming backwards and forwards like this to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it was like, Oh my God.

So they do still ignore that completely and reply to that e-mail inbox, but we don’t ever respond from it.

So yeah, we do read it though it’s quite amusing if you’ve got a bit of time in the week.

And if we see one that we think needs a reply, we will reply but via my different e-mail address.

And we break for four weeks in December, mid-december to mid January to just basically allow the crews to catch up on all the Christmas stuff and winter think that I may have.

Oh, God, I may have covered that.

Yeah.

Oh, the other thing, we did our PR in two phases.

So as soon as we knew that this was going to happen, we started without the logos, we started PR without any of the branding, just to tell people why are we doing this?

This is why we’re doing it.

We had a whole set of frequently asked questions and we did that for the first few months and then we stopped that and then we had a gap and then a short gap and then we launched our logos campaign that was selling the service.

I’ve done this somewhere before and it kind of worked to let people throw their teddies out the pram and have a moan and then not kind of disassociate that from the actual campaign and the logo.

So that separated that out and it seemed to work quite well.

And then we are on, oh, not got this down at all.

So currently we are on 95,000 subscriptions and that’s I put upwards of 4 million, but that’s actually more like 5 million, but allowing for some discounted subscriptions.

And that was we hit our target and some more and quite a lot of people members and other corporate people thought we would get nowhere near that and that no one would subscribe.

So we’ve been having small parties and we, because we had a relatively short time scale that there are other developments we want to add into the portal for the garden waste just to make it a bit more streamlined and a bit more automated.

And then my final slide is just, and weirdly, it coordinates with Louise and I didn’t coordinate with Louise, but we thought this was very amusing.

This is the best fake sticker we’ve had, which is why I said pay attention to the green because they’ve got everything right except the background colour and they even stole someone’s subscription number.

I typed that in and it comes up for another different subscriber and they’d even gone as far as smearing mud on it to make it look like it fitted in.

So that was like the most amusing one we’ve had.

Obviously they got a letter from us telling them to stop and that’s my presentation.