Waste management group Greenstar is making life easier for its customers this Christmas with bin collection and billing reminder texts. Using a bulk texting service from SMS provider, Phonovation, Greenstar sends reminders to customers’ mobiles the night before their bin is due to be collected. The service is proving very popular with the majority of Greenstar’s 70,000 domestic customers already signed up.
The SMS service is also being used to send billing reminders to customers, with the result that an extra 5,000 customers a week are paying on time. When customers receive a text they can conveniently click through to a phone line, also provided by Phonovation, to check their account balance and pay their bill.
Commenting on the Phonovation service, Alice Keogh, head of customer services at Greenstar, says: “The SMS reminder service has delivered real results for us. More customers are paying on time and the volume of calls to our call centre about billing and bin collection has fallen significantly. Our call centre agents can now concentrate on finding and retaining new customers, which will help us grow the business into the future.”
Phonovation is currently the only company in Ireland offering a dual automated Integrated Voice Response (IVR) payment mechanism and SMS service. Companies using the service only pay per SMS delivered and can track customers’ responses, making it highly cost-effective and measurable.
Employing more than 760 people across 40 sites nationwide, Greenstar currently provides household waste and recycling services to over 70,000 household customers in eleven counties nationwide including Cork, Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Wicklow, Sligo, Donegal, Kilkenny , Mayo, Limerick and County Down.
Greenstar provides waste management solutions to industry, business and domestic customers and in its 2008/9 financial year handled over 1.1 million tonnes of waste, recycling or recovering over 60% of that waste.
Greenstar has invested over Eur320 million since it was founded in 1999 to develop essential integrated waste management infrastructure and is making further investment in its Dublin operations to produce fossil fuel substitutes (SRF) from waste previously sent for disposal. In 2010, Greenstar will generate enough energy from recycled waste to power 35,000 homes.