I live in an area that offers garden waste pickups as an extra and to be honest it’s a pretty good service. You pay a yearly fee and you get a sticker to put on your bin to show that it can be collected.
The downside to this as a resident is that you need to sign up at a certain time of the year to get maximum benefit from this, and it can be a bit of a faff if your sticker gets pulled off by mischievous children.
From a service operator standpoint, the downside to this model is having to pay for and send out stickers each year and renewals are always going to be a large administrative task that can be overwhelming and with reductions in spending every penny counts.
At the beginning of August, we sat down with SWISCo about delivering a garden waste subscription service on behalf of Torbay Council and to begin with it was going to follow this methodology. Once a year in November renewals would happen and they would send stickers out to new customers.
Add to this the pressure that no one in Torbay had the relevant bin yet so these would all need to be delivered in time for collections to start at the beginning of November and It was shaping up to be no small task.
Then we thought, why not turn it on its head and do everyone a favour! Why don’t we offer rolling contracts and only deliver bins to people who subscribe and then take them back again if they don’t renew their subscriptions.
There are big benefits to residents in offering rolling contracts. It meant that no matter when they signed up, they would get 12 months of collections for their subscription. A resident could even get another subscription down the line if they realised that they needed another bin without losing any collections on the second bin. And on the rare occasion when a resident didn’t renew their subscription the bin would simply be collected and reused so it wouldn’t be sat in their garden in the way.
There are big benefits to the service as well, they don’t have to order and send out stickers every year, this means no explosion in administrative work once a year. It also offers a cost reduction year on year as the vast majority of comms can all be managed via email and automatically by the system. In fact, even signups without email access will be managed automatically using the Gov Notify service to send out letters to their homes. This means minimal officer involvement for subscriptions over the phone and zero involvement for web subscriptions from an administrative perspective.
This new model did however present some new challenges.
We adapted our existing green waste system to keep a count of the number of bins at any one property. The system then automatically uses this information to decide if it needs to create delivery or collection jobs for bins. When a resident first signs up to the service the system sees that no bins are at the property and schedules them for delivery. Once the crews mark it as delivered the system marks the subscription as active and sends the resident their collection dates.
When a resident reaches the renewal window which is set to 6 weeks prior to expiry, they get an email telling them they can now renew. Any renewal in this period leads to an uninterrupted service as the system recognises that they already have the bins required for their service and as such it marks it as active straight away. To ensure residents don’t miss out on collections when they resubscribe early the new subscription is simply added on to their old subscription. If they let the subscription expire, they get 2 weeks and a final reminder to renew, if they don’t their bin is scheduled for collection by the system and then collected and reused for another subscription which helps keep stock costs down for unused bins. The whole renewal process is now managed automatically by the system with zero officer admin involvement.
To manage the delivery and collections of the bins, we adapted our bin delivery in cab technology to also cater for bin collections. As the majority of people who subscribe to garden waste services do so year after year actual bin churn is expected to be relatively low in the long run.
At the end of all this work SWISCo are now in possession of an almost entirely self-administering system that means officer time is spent only where it’s needed most, helping customers and providing an excellent collection service.
If you would like to know more about the service, please feel free to head over to our website and drop us an email.
