{"id":7916,"date":"2022-11-21T14:00:25","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T22:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/blog\/3-reasons-phone-calls-are-worse-for-operations-than-you-think\/"},"modified":"2025-05-13T12:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T19:28:09","slug":"3-reasons-phone-calls-are-worse-for-operations-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/blog\/3-reasons-phone-calls-are-worse-for-operations-than-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Reasons Phone Calls Are Worse For Operations Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If the people you serve are still calling you when they think you\u2019ve missed collecting their trash or recycling \u2014 or to find out when collection day is, schedule special collections, or ask what\u2019s recyclable \u2013 chances are you\u2019re well positioned to make significant gains in efficiency, effectiveness, and cost savings by taking the next step in your digital transformation.<\/p>\n<p>For many haulers, the real cost of staffing phones is higher than they think, which means that helpful tools to reduce phone interactions or replace them with digital ones are well within budgetary reach.<\/p>\n<p>Not sure call volume is a real problem for your team? With the average cost of handling a single inbound call ringing in (conservatively) at $5.05, according to Cisco, answering phones could be worse for your organization than you think.<\/p>\n<h3><b>1| Phone calls cost more \u2014 sometimes much more \u2014 than we imagine<\/b><\/h3>\n<p>What\u2019s it cost to staff phones for the communities you serve? At a call volume of just three calls per household per year, at the average cost of $5.05 per call, annual spend on staffing phones adds up quickly:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Answering calls from 20,000 households: $75,750 per year<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Answering calls from 100,000 households: $378,750 per year<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Answering calls from 250,000 households: $946,875 per year<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/routeware.com\/solutions\/customer-operations\/customer-education-outreach\/\">Digital tools for waste and recycling education<\/a> that allow people to access information via websites and mobile apps not only reduce calls, but they lead to happier people, too. Digital tools are available 24 hours a day, granting people access to information when it works for them, and meet modern expectations about how cities and businesses should interact with the people they serve.<\/p>\n<p><em><b>Example from the field: <\/b>With digital communication tools for waste and recycling, the City of Durham, North Carolina reduced annual call volume from 1.2 million in 2018 to 750,000 in 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: center;\">4 Ways Video Helps Customer Service<\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Here are four ways video for solid waste fleets helps customer service representatives save time on the phone and become more productive.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If the people you serve are still calling you when they think you\u2019ve missed collecting their trash or recycling \u2014 or to find out when collection day is, schedule special collections, or ask what\u2019s recyclable \u2013 chances are you\u2019re well positioned to make significant gains in efficiency, effectiveness, and cost savings by taking the next [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","resourcetype-blog","aud-government","aud-hauler","loc-north-america","sol-customer-operations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}