National Customer Service Week 2023: Driving Sustainable Growth

Delivering excellent service is the way to sustainable long-term growth and success.

Having been around for more than 120 years, we think we can speak authoritatively on what it takes to achieve long-term success.

Hills Waste Solutions is a people business, and we highly value the relationships we have with all our customers. This is an ethos that is carried through the entire organisation from first point of contact, whether on the telephone or face to face, all the way through to our Operations Team, Customer Service Team and through to senior management.

As a result of this approach, we achieve high retention rates with our customers, sustaining long term growth and success. We're delighted that 67% of our customers have continued to work with us for 5 years or more, and with a Trustpilot score of 4.4 out of 5, we are independently rated “Excellent”.

It sounds easy. It’s not.

Customer loyalty comes with hard work, but at its core are our staff who communicate every day with our customers to help them with the fluctuations in their own business, as demand peaks and troughs throughout the year.

This service approach is first experienced when we talk to a prospective customer. Its only by understanding their business, their problems and issues that we can start to provide a tailored waste solution that helps them control their costs, while at the same time providing the right level of recycling and disposal of their waste to meet their own sustainability goals and longer-term net zero targets.  

And our help doesn’t stop there. We like to keep our customers informed about changes in legislation and matters which may affect their business waste and the decisions they may face. And we are happy to share our considerable expertise as part of the strong bond we have with our customers.

If we are to provide excellent service then we have to have excellent people deliver it so its imperative that we have a strong recruitment programme which carefully sifts through applicants to find the right kind of people, with the right temperament, and attitude to fill each role within the business.

While our staff are core to our success, we also have to provide the right tools to enable our staff to deliver the service. This is often down to ensuring that the software applications we use can deliver the trucks efficiently to our customer premises and enable our customer service teams to know what’s going on with every client at any point in time. 

And actually as one of our other blogs this week on Artificial Intelligence has suggested, sometimes this technology can be provided directly to our customers. With our online portal our customers can create and run their own reports to provide management information, helping to provide valuable insight for decision making and future refinements to waste management. Our portal also provides access to relevant waste documentation required by regulations.

At Hills we have learnt over the years that part of our success is down to managing expectations. By being honest and clear about what we do, explaining what’s possible and what’s practical, and by genuinely trying to help our customers, we win business. And that’s good customer service which delivers sustainable long term growth.