At Thorntons Recycling we pride ourselves on delivering excellent customer service with our team of over 30 agents to our 75,000 clients.

We wanted to know what challenges are involved in running a care team and delivering award-winning customer service.

We spoke with Lorraine Spierin, Thorntons Recycling’s customer care manager, about the day in the life of our call centres.

“The customer care function within Thorntons Recycling is an enjoyable and challenging department. Every day is different. We work hard to ensure that all our customers are kept informed of any changes that affect their service, quickly and efficiently.”

When asked what good customer service means to her, Lorraine answered “Good customer service is providing a premium service. We endeavor to answer all email queries within 24 hours.

When decisions are made, it is always with our customer and their experience in mind. Our customer service quality shows in the number of our customers. The long-standing customers that have been with us nearly 20-30 years is an example of the trust they have with our company.”

Our customers rely on us to provide a regular and efficient service. We offer a weekly and bi-weekly service to both our commercial and household customers. We have won many awards in our premium household and commercial service, and this includes our customer service departments.

“We ensure that our service is premium in waste management and recycling, skip hire and communications.”

With over 30 agents in the office at one time, Lorraine advises us that each query is dealt with and there is a high percentage of feedback that leads to process changes, in the interest of our customers.

“An excess of 20,000 calls are answered each month giving us a 97% service level result. This is an outstanding achievement for our customer service department.”

Our household customers have full visibility online. They can view their bin collection history, their invoices and make payments. Household customers tend to change bin service company’s frequently but with our visibility, our regular text messages and emails, our free app notifications, customers find comfort knowing that we provide the best of the best service. On average our app is accessed over 68,000 times a month and our online portal is visited nearly 50,000 a month.

The customer service team are our point of contact with the customer. Customers appreciate their expertise, care and their genuine interest in the customer and their needs.

“We are continuing to provide premium service by introducing our new commercial customer portal. Like our household customers having full visibility online, our commercial customers will now also have the same.”

“In the future, we hope to introduce instant chat, once again to improve the service for our customers. We are constantly looking at ways to improve while always offering a premium service and customer communication.”