Reliable Skip Hire which offers nationwide skip hire across the UK, has recently invested over £500,000 to increase efficiencies within the business. Traditionally a telephone-based approach to managing orders and dealing with customer enquiries was costing over £250,000 per year in staff salaries.
Managing suppliers and contractors from across the country, all with different processes has also resulted in large volumes of manual administrative work. A huge challenge was presented to enable the business to reach its 5 year target of processing over 50,000 skips per year as every supplier and contractor has a different format and style of providing invoice material. Different scenarios included document formats, layouts, attachments and methods of sending invoices across. The new system utilises Google Sheets API and DocParser to process and sort the invoices by supplier, eliminating any physical paperwork.
In 2021, Reliable Skip Hire invested in £500,000 to fully automate the order process and back office administration. The crux of this involved complex systems development which would allow for the automatic quoting of various different skip hire sizes across over 7,000 postcodes in the UK.
Paul Bennett, Commercial Director states:
“Whilst we continue to invest further in our current staff, to reach targets for our shareholders, we have had to find new solutions to increase the profitability as we expand.”
The new postcode ordering system which was implemented in late 2021 has reduced call volumes by over 75% since it went live, saving considerable expenditure on staffing costs and customer service.
Customer experience has also improved and a recent survey suggests that 80% of customers prefer the ability to order online at any time, making the project management process for construction-based businesses much smoother.
Further improvements were made to the back office process of handling supplier and contractor invoices by implementing an AI-based PDF document reader which allows for invoices to automatically be processed, reconciled and logged without any human intervention.
Although the new processes have only been in place since 2021, reports and forecasts are indicating that the saving by increasing efficiencies is estimated to save over £2m in the next 5 years as the company has received investment to further scale it’s operations.
Michael Davidson, Operations Director stated:
“Whilst we are always looking for ways to increase the bottom-line, traditionally the skip hire industry has been very resistant to change. Perhaps the biggest challenge has been to persuade key stakeholders to invest in the use of software technology to increase efficiencies, instead of simply recruiting more staff. We are already seeing a positive return on the investment and as we continue to grow, we have further plans to improve internal processes further.”
The business has plans to further automate processes with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Further investment is being considered to automate inbound telephone calls, by developing a state of the art solution to provide customers with an automated telephone booking service. The primary challenge will be to connect the postcode pricing system with an AI telephone switchboard system such as Amazon’s Lex service.
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