Warrington Council automates waste contracts, boosting efficiency

For many, the idea of “setting and forgetting” the service of common tasks is the pinnacle of efficiency; being able to avoid worrying about the things that might otherwise be taken for granted in daily life. However, more often than not, it’s the details of those seemingly minor steps that can make the difference between smooth service and the kinds of disruptions to routines that can both annoy and derail your day.

Government service workers know this balance all too well, making sure the day-to-day needs of their constituents are met with as much ease as possible, seemingly without a second’s thought.

Warrington Borough Council, serving the Warrington community in Cheshire, England, faced just that kind of challenge to smooth execution of commercial waste renewals for businesses in their community. Each financial year, commercial waste customers renew their contract with the council, hoping to do so in a quick and efficient manner to avoid any interruption in service and the messes that can come with a delay in waste removal.

A manual process negatively impacts contract renewals

For the 2023-24 year, Warrington had more than 750 trade contracts in place, putting the council team dedicated to the commercial waste area under pressure to process the new contracts quickly and efficiently. The project objective was to ensure customers would experience a positive and efficient user journey while renewing their existing contracts for the 2024-25 period, and in return decreasing the manual intervention required from the commercial waste team to process the new contracts received. 

The team revised the renewal process to better enable customers to request, review, and confirm their new contract details within one easy step. Previously, customers requested a contract, and the commercial waste team would be alerted to the request. From there, the commercial waste team would look up and enter the contract details into the back-office process, which then alerted the customer to log in again to review and confirm their contract. Once the customer confirmed the service price, the process then alerted the commercial waste team, who would then confirm the contract and send the final correspondence to the customers. 

With a significant number of manual touchpoints, the process presented a lengthy and complex journey that resulted in many new contract requests, but not as many being confirmed. As a result, the borough’s Waste Services team was forced to make more than 500 telephone calls in April 2023 alone asking customers to re-enter their accounts and complete the renewals process. 

Automation makes for efficient processes

The borough team knew they needed to quickly identify a new process to ensure the entire revised renewals process was combined into one easy step.

The Commercial Waste team leveraged Granicus digital services and tools solutions, using database integration via an auto lookup control to enable automatic and seamless retrieval of the relevant details of a customer’s new contract from a back-office database, based on the customer’s govService profile. 

As a result, commercial waste customers are now able to request, review, and confirm their new contract in one easy step. The downstream benefits meant staff on the Commercial Waste team no longer need to manually input the contract details, reducing the need for the team to reach out to customers to confirm their contracts. 

Warrington Borough Council Waste Service Manager Steve Andrews described the revised process as a “huge success story for the waste services team.”

“The revised process had worked beyond expectations and provided such positive benefits to the service overall,” he said. By the start of April 2024, more than 720 revised renewals applications had been received successfully using the new process.

Andrews also praised the work of the project staff. “The collaboration between the Change Delivery team and the Waste Service team is a true example of a ONE Team approach within Warrington Borough Council,” he said.