A Garden waste service and Debtors team collaboration, reduces customer frustration and saves time and money with a hybrid mail solution.

Working together, the Waste operations and Debtors teams have used Hybrid Mail to reduce costs and regain 6 working days in the process of  issuing Invoices and Information about the annual Garden waste service. Read their story and find out how the councils hybrid mail partner can support your department whether you are sending a single letter or a large mailing. 

What is the Garden Waste Service?

The Garden Waste service is managed by the Waste operations team and operates from March to October each year collecting customers green waste and recycling it into compost.  The service is an annual service which must be paid for each year by the service user to secure a place on the delivery rounds. New customers can pay using an online link to ‘book’ their service. For existing customers an invoice is raised by the debtors team for the service user to pay to recommence their service. The Waste operations team contacts all customers to advise of their collection days and weeks. These communication’s can be electronic or paper based dependant on the customers preference.

What was the Issue?

Of the 11,000 garden waste customers approximately 2000 have requested paper communications, this required the each team to produce 9000 email communications with either an invoice or a schedule and to produce, fold, envelope, frank and post a further 2000 documents each. The process of creating the paper versions took 3 people from each team over a day to do resulting in 6 working days lost to filling and sending envelopes

Following the release of the Garden waste schedules and Invoices in 2023 the contact centre, cashiers team and debtors team saw a significant rise in calls from confused or annoyed customers who had only received one or the other of their documents either electronically or via post and were struggling to get their service restarted.  The cause of these complaints was found to be the timing differences between the issuing of the two documents by the two services and the failure of some items electronic and posted to arrive at all.

What have they done?

Utilising the skills of the Marketing and Media team and working collaboratively the two teams have taken advantage of the corporate Electronic and Hybrid mail solutions, Gov.Delivery and DSI. The services arranged for a joint communication to be developed which included the schedules and information for the Garden waste service and the invoice and payment details in one communication.  The electronic versions were then sent via the council Gov.delivery contract and electronic copies of the paper versions were produced and uploaded to DSI who then collated the two sets of documents into a single postage item for each customer and posted them.

Results:

• Improved experience for customers
• Significant reduction in the number of calls to the call centre and cashiers
• Cost Saving £1664 on postage costs, envelopes, paper and printing
• Time Saving 6 working days
• Elimination of a mundane and labour-intensive task.

Time saved and costs trimmed by the Local Taxation Team.

The forward-thinking Local Taxation Team implements ‘Hybrid Mail’ to deliver reduced costs, improved efficiency and the elimination of a very dull task.

Who are the Local Taxation Team?

The Local Taxation team is responsible for the maintenance and administration of Council Tax and Business Rates accounts and the billing and collection of charges due. Their main purpose is to maintain and amend Council/Rate Taxpayers’ accounts because of changes in ownership, the awarding or withdrawing of discounts and reliefs, and any other relevant changes in circumstances and to deal with customer enquiries. They also provide advice and clarification on, liability, charges, entitlement to reliefs and related issues.

What was the issue?

The section sends out a lot of pieces of mail, sometimes thousands of letters at a time. Each of these must be addressed correctly, printed, collated, folded, packed into envelopes, franked and posted. In a year the section sends around 50,000 pieces of mail.
They sometimes need to add in leaflets, or sort through reminders to remove those being sent to Council clients, which needs to be done manually. This is time consuming, dull work, prone to human error.

There is a packing machine to help with the task, but its old and unreliable and needs to be replaced as it is prone to jamming and jams mean that the whole run needs to be repeated.

It takes a team of 25 to 30 people to pack between 5,000 and 8,000 letters in a day.

What have they done?

They have used a hybrid mail tool called GovMail. This system enables to complete a letter template and perform a mail merge in the normal manner to produce a mailshot. Instead of sending the job to print, it is sent to ‘GovMail’, which appears as another printer on the list. That is the last time they need to be involved with the mailshot.

Its then sent to a company that prints, packs, and posts the item of mail for them. As it is automated the system can be set to remove items being sent specific names or addresses, specific leaflets can be added at this point too. All at a cost of 45p a letter as opposed to the 75p a letter for 2nd class postage, it is as simple as that.

Results:
Costs saved and avoided:
        Cheaper postage costs.
        No need to replace packing machine.
        Staff time.
No human errors.
Elimination of a mundane and labour-intensive task.

Find out more:

If you are still printing and posting your own mail whether it’s a single letter a week or a massive mail out there is a Hybrid mail solution for you. To find out how easy it is to move to this time and money saving solution contact Mark Howard, Senior Transformation and Change Officer for a demonstration or you can contact the Transformation team via our webform to let us know where you think hybrid mail could be used in your team's processes.