Producing permits for garden waste used to be a real grind. Whether it was long, frantic hours scrawling addresses on permits in-house, or hours of admin, printing on a temperamental laser printer. The tedious hours of pack and dispatch…
Once all that was done, it was often difficult to know with much certainty whether a specific permit had actually been dispatched!
What happened when a resident queried where their permit was? Did customer service pass on a message to the Garden Service team? Did the Garden Service team then issue another permit and hope for the best?
How many hours of quality staff time was wasted in making all of that happen?
Then came the ability to outsource to a supplier. You could organise the various parts of the print package (envelopes, leaflets, standard stickers etc) and as long as you had the correct minimum quantities, you could email over your spreadsheet and hope that all permits were dispatched on time. That worked well during initial uptake. But then what happened as the quantities fell throughout the year? The price went up and eventually you ended up ordering blanks and printing them yourself – back to square one!
As technology has advanced, fortunately things have got better - a lot better!
You can now use a cloud-based management portal where you can securely upload data as often as you like, have your complete permit-packs printed, packed, scanned, dispatched and delivered to residents within 10 days from upload. You can even notify the resident with a council-branded email to let them know that their permit has just been dispatched!
Data is imported and live from the moment it is uploaded so you can see a permit sitting in a print queue immediately. In fact, you have all your permit data at your fingertips in real-time.
Better still, you have that information available to your Customer Service teams. Customer Service can identify exactly when a resident’s permit was dispatched, check the details and order a replacement in a single click while the resident is still on the phone!
With no minimum dispatch requirement, fixed prices and barcode scans of every permit dispatched, you are back in control.
The permits have moved on a long way too with seriously high-tack adhesive and light-fast inks, residents’ addresses printed on the permit for security, and repeated in large font for bin operatives to see.
PermiServ leads the way for managed garden waste permit schemes making life easier for councils and residents alike.
(PermiServ is a service provided by Euro Label Printers)
