In support of National Customer Service Week, we are looking at how Customer Service and technology work together to give the best experience.

We believe that it’s the customer who decides how they wish to interact with us. As a provider of commercial waste management, we make it easy and convenient for businesses to reach and interact with us, whether this is by phone, email or through a digital experience online.

At the same time, technology is critical to our ability to deliver the services we provide, to support a timely and reliable service, while maintaining value for money. In some cases the technology interface is obvious to the customer, but in other cases the customer just expects us to deliver, and is less aware or interested in what it does, as long as we keep to our service level comitment.

At Hills we view technology as an enabler to enhance the customer experience rather than forcing customers down a path that is convenient for the business, but frustrating for the customer.

A prospective customer relationship may start in the digital world through web searches and visits to our website. For prospective Hills customers our technology interface extends all the way to online quote and purchase for those who know what they want. For others, help can be requested using one of our online forms, or for more complex queries or fast answers, businesses can call us directly. Either way we use digital technology to give prospective customers a good experience.

When customers call us we keep the use of technology to a minimum, but the technology we do use at this point allows us to route calls to the correct person for help, and allows us to monitor call volumes to ensure we have enough staff available to take calls and to maintain a positive relationship with callers.

When we are helping customers by telephone, our IT systems allow us to provide bespoke pricing, arrange collections and problem solve customer queries. Although the customer may not have direct experience of the technology, the information provided requires the technology to produce it.

Collecting waste is a complex business and technology is critical to the efficient planning and routing of the trucks to collect customer business waste. Although the technology here is not seen by customers, they benefit from our efficiency. 

Even when our trucks visit a customer site the technology may not apparent to them but our staff can record a wealth of information about the collection, for example the weight of the waste collected at a customer site, overweight bins and access problems. All this information is sent directly back to head office and can then be sent directly to customers, as proof of collection.

We also provide customers with direct access to an online portal where information such as schedules, collections, and invoices can be found, making it easy for customers to have easy access for administrative purposes.

So, technology in its many forms, helps us to make waste management easy for our customers, whether the technology interface is accessed directly by the customer or whether it is experienced through our Customer Support and Collection teams. Without technology the real customer experience would be much poorer and more expensive.