Waste Connections, Inc. serves more than two million customers across 29 states. Like a well-oiled machine, they collect, transfer, dispose and recycle waste for residential, commercial and industrial customers daily, a very big job, indeed.
Surprisingly, this massive daily responsibility was simple compared to the mountain of stress the time consuming task of maintaining its accounts receivable duties had been. In fact, before Waste Connections discovered CallFire, its payment collection practices of making individual calls and sending out reminder notices were considered outdated and inefficient.
“Mailing and calling such a high volume of customers was becoming cumbersome,” says Bonnie Hawkins of Waste Connections. The nightmare of spending countless hours and money getting caught up on late accounts was finally over when Waste Connections found CallFire’s easy-to-use and affordable Voice Broadcast solution. The simple yet powerful platform allows clients to launch Voice Broadcast campaigns that replace a more laborious, manual payment collection process. “Now we have the ability to reach 50,000 customers at once, if necessary.”
Before CallFire, Waste Connections would manually dial up to hundreds, if not thousands, of phone numbers at a time. When its employees weren’t making calls, they were sending very large quantities of expensive mail that were ironically tossed into the trash and ultimately picked up by Waste Connections.
Instead of creating more garbage, Waste Connections soon discovered that customizing a pre-recorded voice broadcast campaign meant that less manpower was needed. “We can reach more customers at one time. It’s less burdensome than mailing and we get so much more done,” says Hawkins. “A phone list assigned to two people over the course of three to four days can now be completed by one person in about 15 minutes.”
For just pennies per call, companies like Waste Connections are not only collecting payments at a higher rate, but also at a lower cost. “Bad Debt has reduced 40% since implementing CallFire,” says Hawkins.
Collecting payments isn’t the only use for CallFire’s Voice Broadcast solution. “We also use it to alert customers of delays.” Staying connected through courtesy calls to customers strengthens relationships and community trust.
Broadcast call campaigns have proved so successful that the company has expressed interest in other possible CallFire telephony solutions, such as its Cloud Call Center, IVR, Call Tracking and SMS texting tools to stay connected to customers.
Like Waste Connections, CallFire wears customer satisfaction as a badge of honor. According to Hawkins, “We’ve shared CallFire with all offices in our district. We think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”