Sanitation Service Call Centers: A Missing Link for Improved Service Delivery?

CRM systems have taken over sales and marketing departments by storm, making them the single largest segment in the software market with an annual revenue estimated to exceed $80 billion by 2025. In 2020 over 91% of US companies with more than 10 employees used CRM systems, up from only 47% in 2014. One of the key factors for the rapid growth was the mainstreaming of big data and cloud-based solutions, in which CRM systems can unfold their full potential. This is underlined by the fact that today 87% of businesses use cloud-based CRM solutions, up from a mere 12% in 2012. Despite CRM software existing for over 30 years, it is only recently that CRM systems have transitioned from being fringe to mainstream technologies for when it comes to customer acquisition and sales. Speaking in the words of the renowned data analyst Hans Rosling ‘we tend to forget how the world used to be just a few years ago.’

Pit Vidura is one of the early adopters of a call-center and CRM system in the African sanitation sector. We can only speculate why call-centers and CRM solutions are not widely used in our sector of operations to date. High implementation costs, the need for rigid processes, and a general mistrust in call-centers probably play an important role in their underutilization in the sanitation sector. However, our research and findings on our own call-center performance and process improvement efforts speak their very own language and reveal an insight into data that has not been widely analyzed — if even collected or recorded.

Our call-center and back-office team: (from left) Grace Desture, Claudine Dusabinema, Annick Ziraje

To date, informal settlements with the most pressing demand for fecal sludge emptying services do not present a scalable business case due to the ever-same reasons: customers’ low willingness to pay and the inability to mechanize emptying due to bad road access, poor-quality latrine structures and high amounts of solid waste discarded into pit latrines. To tackle this challenge, we aim at enhancing the understanding of drivers for demand and bottlenecks in the service delivery chain. Therefore, call-log, customer, and sales data for 2019 and 2020 were analyzed by focusing on abandoned calls (commonly known as ‘missed calls’), sales process conversion rates, and leads-to-customer (LTC) transition times. The changes in key metrics were collated with key interventions during the assessment period to identify their impact on the business’ operations.

Figure 1: Abandonment rates & callback times

The hiring of a call center agent and the extension of call center operation hours significantly reduced abandonment rates and callback times from over 90% to below 10% and from over 30 hours to less than 30 minutes, respectively (shown in Figure 1). Received calls during out-of-office hours showed highest conversion rates (26% above average) and short LTC times (58% below average) where we concluded that these customers have an urgent demand and swiftly avail the emptying fees.

Figure 2: Customer conversion rates for different process steps

Streamlining sales processes and the employment of a sales and marketing manager improved opportunity-to-empty conversion from below 60% to over 70%, while decreasing LTC times from 13.6 to 3.0 days, which can be seen in Figure 2. LTC times showed a reasonable correlation with high attrition rates: the longer customers wait to be served, the higher the likelihood that they find an alternative service provider. The process step with the longest duration is the “scheduling of empty” (3.1 days) making up 55% of the total LTC time (see Figure 3), mainly related to customers taking time to deposit the first instalment leading to the recommendation to grant small cash-discounts to incentivize fast payments.

Figure 3: LTC transition times for sales process steps

The interventions that we implemented as a team over the past two years prove to bear fruits and helped in improving the sales process. We will continue to improve and streamline our sales-processes with two goals: maximize conversion rates and minimize LTC times (wait times for service delivery). In simple words, we aim to serve more customers in a more timely fashion and pass on our savings to low-income households. Continuous improvement is the name of the game. Over the next few months we will focus on standardizing processes, streamlining delivery schedules, and prioritizing follow ups with household customers. Stay tuned as we learn more and serve more households with safe and affordable basic services.