7 Ways Municipalities Lose Big When They Don’t Embrace Digital Citizen Technologies

Opportunity cost – what will you give up to get something else?

Research suggests that not going digital comes with hard costs. The good news is, moving your program into the digital realm has never been easier or more affordable. 

Here are 7 potential opportunity costs to motivate you to go digital without delay.

1. Reaction time. When your program, business or enterprise isn’t digitally aligned, you end up moving too slowly to serve effectively, wasting precious resources along the way.

Consider service-disruption notifications for hefty snows, diesel-clogging frigid temperatures, or tropical storms that stop collection trucks in their tracks. In emergent situations like these, the best way to contact residents in a timely manner is through digital channels. 

Automated emails, texts or voice messages also can spare you and others from endless phone calls from unhappy residents when things don’t go as planned. 

Plus, digital interactions are a lot less expensive in the long run — “Gartner pegs the per-interaction cost for self-service at around $0.10, while live interactions — such as phone and email — cost around $8 to manage. The potential savings of deflecting calls to self-service are huge!” according to Khoros.

2. Decision-making metrics. When it’s time to allocate funds among educational initiatives, how will you decide where to invest? If you’re digitally aligned, you have the answers already. You’ll check the data, benchmark it, implement education to target problems, then measure again to check progress.

No data? No reliable information to positively influence the decision-making process. No way to benchmark. No way to log success.

Sounds really hard, doesn’t it? It’s expensive too. Designing campaigns without consulting data once cost 100-year-old US retailer JC Penney 12 percent in profits in one quarter.

3. Keeping Up With The Competition. Municipalities often improve their recycling programs through peer emulation, one of the most important functions of the state or regional recycling conference, if we might say so. But when your program begins to lag behind on digital, it’s hard to follow in the footsteps of the most effective programs.

4. Bolstering Sustainable Recycling Behaviors. Recycling contamination and other unsustainable behaviors around solid waste add up. 

According to CBC, in its article Many Canadians are recycling wrong, and it’s costing us millions, each percentage point decrease in contamination could lower recycling costs in Toronto by $600,000 to $1 million a year, “and that correlates right back into the rates that we charge for waste collection.”

“Something as simple as a piece of paper with a coffee stain on it — that piece of paper a year ago would have been recyclable,” says Jim McKay, general manager of solid waste management for the City of Toronto. “Today that’s actually garbage.”

Without a mechanism for collecting data about solid waste topics that are confusing to residents, such as our Waste Wizard, municipalities and haulers alike are ill-equipped to identify root causes and address them through targeted education.

5. Reducing Complaints. If the cost to a municipality to handle a complaint phone call is $8, as previously noted, then what is the value of preventing that call with a delightful digital solution before it happens? 

It’s certainly greater than $8, especially when we consider the serious repercussions of decreased trust in the offending program, business or municipality. 

On the flip side, it’s perhaps even more difficult to place a dollar value on a positive interaction, and yet we know intuitively that when residents and customers feel understood, they’re more likely to continue participating in our programs or buying our services. 

What better reason do we need to delight them with digital?

In recent years, sentiment has shifted towards digital. A recent CCW report found that 82% of consumers are now more comfortable with self-service than before the pandemic, according to Khoros.

6. Decreased Resource Consumption. Digital communications like the online and app-based Collection Calendar save money over traditional print-and-mail methods, but what else does digital save? Well, trees, for one thing. 

A simple, single-sheet mailing to 50,000 households requires at least five trees according to Sierra Club, and its delivery will generate over a ton of C02, says Pitney Bowes.

7. Meeting Residents Where They Are. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is Baby Boomers. How is this important? 

It strongly indicates that mature homeowners are online – and are using social networks to gain helpful information. Meeting residents and customers where they are—on social media networks—encourages trust and provides an inexpensive platform for regular information sharing, interaction and social listening.

Looking to engage hard to reach demographics? Learn more by reading our free article.