Transforming customer facing operations and achieving a double-digit sales growth at Biffa

With operations at over 195 sites spanning the length and breadth of the country, Biffa services over 2.2 million households and collects 4.3 million bins per week just within their municipal division. From their conception in 1912, Biffa has developed far beyond waste collection and into recycling, treatment, and energy generation services.

Remit

Biffa has grown its business organically and through acquisition over the last eight years and subsequently recognised the need to improve its back-office support functions and, in particular, some key parts of the customer journey. Biffa reached out to BIE to find an interim Customer Shared Support Director to design and implement a programme of improvements across the Biffa customer service channels. This would ultimately influence the ways in which Biffa would interface with customers, improve base levels of customer service and provide a scalable service function which could absorb levels of high growth.

The successful candidate was Debra Revens, a commercial and outcomes focused transformation leader with over 25 years UK and international experience across all areas of sales, contact centres and customer services.

Results

During her time at Biffa, Debra delivered a restructure of customer facing operations, which included migration of a core operation from a high cost, challenging geography to a lower cost base in one of their existing but under-utilised facilities. In tandem, she led a programme of process improvement initiatives across telesales driven SME sales and customer services.

Financial benefits through the successful delivery of these key initiatives amounted to substantial ongoing annual cost reductions and a consistent growth of SME sector revenues (ie more than double-digit sales growth). As important as these tangible gains have been, the investment in a high-quality management team in both the front and back office customer service functions is an enduring benefit for Biffa.

Debra is currently involved with the next stage of this programme which is the re-design of Biffa’s e2e SME customer offer. A key part of this is the increasing shift to a digital strategy for e-commerce and for improved customer retention.