Taking Action: Customer Service Trends and Remaining Competitive in Waste and Recycling

Brianna Langley Henderson

As we look ahead to 2023, it’s not difficult to see that companies across the globe need to evaluate the upcoming customer experience trends if they want to remain competitive.

This article looks at how customer experience is likely to evolve over the coming year and what action steps companies should consider to set them up for continued success with customers.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience (CX) encompasses all aspects of how a customer interacts with a company – it’s about creating a positive relationship between customers and your brand by providing consistency and quality service across all channels. A good CX strategy in today’s world is what boosts customer loyalty, increases brand recognition, and fosters customer engagement.

The Growing Importance of CX

As technology advances, customers are expecting more personalized, efficient experiences when they interact with businesses in all markets, and the waste and recycling industry is no exception. Customers want faster responses, easier ways to get their questions answered, and access to information 24/7.

The customer journey has become more complex as channels like online ordering have grown in popularity — meaning that there are more touchpoints for companies to manage at every intersection. The ability to track customer journeys through these various channels, as well as create systems optimized for responding quickly and accurately to customer requests, is now essential.

And the waste and recycling industry faces some unique challenges in creating customer experience.  Our customers aren’t looking for a drawn-out experience that involves total emersion into a brand. What we offer is simple, or at least it should be to our customers.

They pay us, and we take care of their trash and recycling. That’s it. From a customer’s perspective, that’s as in-depth as the transaction needs to be.

As a result, the best experience we can offer is making it as easy and painless as possible to access our services so that consumers don’t have to give it a second thought afterwards.

The Rise of Economic Modeling

Get ready — because we are about to see a surge of CX teams using economic models. As waste and recycling businesses strive to remain competitive in today's digital landscape, economic modeling has become an essential tool for developing customer-facing strategies. In the age of big data and artificial intelligence, economic models allow companies to accurately forecast future trends and make informed decisions on how best to optimize their customer experience. By understanding the economic forces that affect customer behavior, our industry can proactively plan for potential disruptions and develop strategies that will help us stay ahead of the curve in 2023.

Simply put, economic models help us understand customer needs, enabling us to better anticipate customer demands and develop customer-centric strategies in preparation for the future. For example, economic models can be used to understand demand elasticity, allowing firms to know when it is profitable to increase or decrease prices based on market conditions – and this plays very well into the seasonality of our business.

Additionally, economic models provide insight into how customers value different features or services offered by a business. This, of course, allows companies to better target promotions surrounding lines of business like roll-off rentals and yard waste collection accordingly.

With this information in hand, businesses are able to adjust their service offerings according to what drives optimal growth and profitability with minimal risk exposure.

Note: If you’ve never built an economic model before and need some help getting started, I found this video to be very helpful.

Data Science Reigns Supreme

Data science is quickly becoming one of the most important areas of study for customer experience management. In 2023 (and beyond), data will be used to identify customer trends, predict customer behavior and inform customer relationships. By leveraging data-driven insights, waste and recycling companies can tailor their strategies to meet individual customer demands as well as understand customer needs on a larger scale.

Data scientists have training on powerful tools that look at predictive analytics, which places them in a unique position to understand consumer behaviors in real-time and develop tailored experiences based on individual needs. And now, with machine learning algorithms, data scientists are also able to identify patterns in customer interactions and use this information to build out experiences that increase engagement, loyalty and retention.

Ultimately, data science enables the waste and recycling industry to create smarter customer experiences, which leads to increased revenue growth over time.

Preparing Your Teams Now

Here are several actions your business should consider in 2023 in order to prepare itself for future CX opportunities:

Create an optimized website: Make sure your website is up-to-date with modern design elements such as responsive layouts, which makes content accessible on any device type. You’ll also want to make sure your page loading times are low so users don't leave out of frustration due its slow load times. Beyond that, you’ll want to go ahead and study up on user experience and SEO best practices. Websites are no good if customers can’t find and easily navigate through them.

Monitor feedback: Set up feedback mechanisms throughout each stage of the customer journey so you know what areas need improvement immediately following each transaction. Tracking feedback is key in understanding what areas need attention if you want keep up with evolving consumer preferences.

Train staff: Don't forget about keeping your frontline employees up-to-date on new regulations or software updates they may need extra training on — this helps prevent misunderstandings and costly mistakes down the line. This type of gap in efficiency or accuracy is exactly what will cause the customers of 2023 to choose a competitor.

As we look ahead at expected trends surrounding CX, now is the time invest our resources wisely. The importance of creating an effective customer strategy before everyone else catches up cannot be understated, but it's equally important not forget old fashioned, community-centric engagement and touchpoints that made our industry charming to begin with. Those who take proactive steps now — whether it's deploying robotics process automation (RPA) or just getting more involved in local charities and events — will surely benefit from higher satisfaction rates among stakeholders in 2023 and beyond.

Brianna Langley Henderson is a customer experience strategist with over seven years of experience working in CX, marketing, and public relations. She currently works as a Regional CX Strategist at Waste Connections. In this role, she speaks at several internal company conferences each year, and has been featured in prominent customer experience publications such as CMSWire. When she’s not busy monitoring and tailoring customer experiences, Brianna can be found spending time outdoors with her family or enjoying a good book.

The best way to connect with her is through LinkedIn.”

Editor's Note: Do you have an opinion or article you would like to share with Waste360 readers? Send an e-mail to [email protected].