Wrexham County Borough Council is delivering personalised waste and recycling bin collection reminders to nearly 10,000 residents, providing the information they need to take the correct action at the right moment.
These reminders – alongside proactive educational messages about what can and can’t be recycled – have already had a significant positive impact on local recycling rates; for example the number of bins not being collected due to contamination has gone down 27%.
The automated reminders (delivered through the GovDelivery Advanced Package for Communications Cloud by Granicus) have also reduced avoidable customer contact because more people know what bin to put out and when. This has led to a 48% drop in the number of phone calls from residents (who put the wrong colour bin out) asking why it hasn’t been collected, freeing up more time for stretched customer contact centres.
Using the marketing automation and audience segmentation capabilities in the Communications Cloud has reduced an officer’s workload by a whole day a week, thanks to a fully automated self-managing campaign solution. No longer does a communications officer have to manually produce and schedule hundreds of reminders in English and Welsh for the week/month. Once the campaigns are set to active, they run themselves, and new subscribers are automatically placed into the right audience segment according to their postcode.
Wrexham’s proactive communications strategy for helping residents put the right bin out at the right time, and only the right items in each bin type, is a superb example of how bite-size timely information in an inbox can prompt successful behavioural change.
Customer satisfaction is also up and feedback from subscribers outlines how these regular reminders can make a huge difference to people’s lives and well-being.
For more examples of how proactive email and SMS updates can improve waste and recycling services, check out this guide.
If you’d like to find out how your organisation could use automated digital messages to help change citizens’ behaviour, please get in touch.
