Key Points
- Large UK unitary local authority serving 551,560 people
- Using Waste Wizard to build consistent digital recycling communications
- Searches from 90% of council postcodes through the website tool
- Over 6,000 average monthly user sessions over the last two years
Challenge
Like all local authorities, Buckinghamshire used to find that communicating consistently with residents around recycling programmes and initiatives was a time-consuming challenge.
In looking for a solution, they wanted to reduce confusion at the kerbside and also improve the efficiency of their waste and recycling engagement and communications processes.
Solution
Buckinghamshire used the Waste Wizard, our digital recycling engagement tool, to build consistent recycling communications across all the geographic areas they serve.
Prior to becoming a unitary authority in 2020, the county waste partnership supported a group of five local authorities. The Waste Wizard enabled Buckinghamshire to combine this different recycling information behind the scenes and present a consistent public-facing message to residents.
“We only need between 7-10% of unique visits to the Waste Wizard on our website to have replaced a phone call to the Council to have saved more than the annual cost of the Waste Wizard.” – Andrew Jenkins, Waste Prevention Team Leader
The tool has helped them overcome the problem of recycling confusion for residents by communicating targeted, consistent messages about to different households using different collection systems. The only information visible to residents through the tool is specific to them, they do not see information relevant to other collection areas. This allows the council to talk about in detail about recycling to all residents without the need for long and complicated information.
And implementation was easy too. “The team were fantastic in setting up the Waste Wizard back-end programmes and did 95% of the work before going live, by using and building on our existing waste collection information.” “It meant that all of the councils involved saved hours of officer time spent reviewing thousands of lines of data which would have been needed to provide an alternative waste A-Z service.”
Benefits
Since going live the Waste Wizard has seen fantastic engagement across Buckinghamshire including:
- Searches from 90% of Buckinghamshire postcodes through the website tool
- Over 6,000 average monthly user sessions over the last two years
- Over 112,000 unique visitors, which is equivalent to more than a quarter of all adults in Buckinghamshire
In addition to helping citizens, the tool is also assisting staff. Our customer services team regularly use the software to resolve resident enquiries. This helps reduce call length, improve satisfaction, and in the long run to cut call volume and costs as more residents switch to
using the Waste Wizard instead of calling the council.
The council have calculated that they only need between 7-10% of unique visits to the website tool to have replaced a phone call to the council to have saved more than the annual cost of the Waste Wizard.
Buckinghamshire have said they have found the continual support for the solution to be exemplary. The few technical issues they have had over the last four years have been fixed promptly with regular updates from the product team.
Andrew Jenkins, Waste Prevention Team Leader at the Council says, “The Academy helps us make the best of the Waste Wizard through new features and better use of existing features. We’ve continued to develop the way we use the Waste Wizard including the “Banner” feature when we have service changes, or short term promotions to run.
We recently used the competition feature as well which was introduced to us by our Customer Success Representative and managed by them from start to finish.”
About Routeware
Routeware is a leading technology company for the waste and environmental services sector. In the UK, our software and services have been used by over 200 local authorities and most of the leading waste and resource management companies, helping save an estimated £100M+ for UK local government.
