WASTE MANAGEMENT ROUNDS OUT ITS DIGITAL PLATFORM WITH THE LAUNCH OF ITS NEW WEBSITE, POWERED BY OPTIMIZELY, CREATING GREATER FLEXIBILITY AND AGILITY, EASIER ENGAGEMENT AND THE ABILITY TO DELIVER EXPONENTIAL VALUE TO ITS CUSTOMERS.

Optimizely and Salesforce now bring the best of both worlds together for Waste Management, creating a comprehensive digital platform that provides seamless, capable and flexible technology across Waste Management’s public and self-service commerce websites, helping to deliver engaging customer experiences at every touchpoint.

ABOUT WASTE MANAGEMENT

Waste Management is Aotearoa’s leading materials recovery, recycling and waste management provider, with more than 1800 team members located across 70 sites nationwide. Every year, Waste Management collects more than 1 million tonnes of waste and recycles well over 200,000 tonnes – and is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to redirect, neutralise and use waste, with a strategic ambition to be the leader in materials and energy recovery, helping to create a carbon positive future for Aotearoa.

THE CHALLENGE

Held back by legacy technology – an outdated and capability-poor CMS and the need to navigate disparate sites and data sources – Waste Management wanted to do things differently.

But rather than launch right into a run-of-the-mill technology project, they saw a chance to step back and take the opportunity to do a strategic rethink in alignment with their organisational purpose and vision – all with the end goal of becoming increasingly customer-focused, making it easy for their customer to engage with Waste Management and receive greater value at every touchpoint.

Darryl Michaux, Waste Management’s Customer and Digital Delivery Manager, explains:

“We wanted to move to a new platform that offered us the flexibility to operate at speed and do more, faster. But we didn’t want the project to be a technology project – we wanted to be clear about our customers’ needs, rather than simply moving from an old to a new system.

So we took the opportunity to start with a blank page. We worked with Davanti to define our vision, goals and customers’ needs. We wanted to understand the problems that our customers are trying to solve, so it’s easier to do business with us. Our mantra in everything was make it easy.”

In rethinking its digital presence and the technologies enabling it, Waste Management saw an exciting opportunity to become increasingly data-driven, adaptive and responsive to the ever-changing needs of its customers and to enable greater self-serve capability.

And, as a modern waste and recycling management provider with a mission to help Aotearoa move towards a carbon positive future, it wanted to more proactively tell its full story and communicate the entire breadth and depth of its services.

THE APPROACH

Waste Management’s CMS replatforming journey began in early 2020 with its longstanding partner, Davanti, helping Waste Management to conduct a technology-agnostic market scan and product analysis in order to assess and select the best CMS technology platform for Waste Management’s current and future requirements.

“We wanted the platform we chose to be super-fast, easy to use, safe and secure – all those things that are so important in our modern world. And ultimately enable us to create the right experiences for our customers”.

In addition to this, Davanti helped Waste Management to “start with a blank sheet of paper” and provided strategic advisory, digital strategy expertise and human-centred design capability to help Waste Management “take the time to understand what we wanted to achieve and the approach we needed to take,” says Darryl.

The Optimizely digital experience platform (formerly Epi) was selected, and the first cab off the rank – www.flexibin.co.nz – was launched in late 2020, with its fully-fledged website launched 10 months later.

The success of the project and the quality of the outcome was the result of both a strong strategic partnership and a tightly integrated and highly connected cross-functional team, with Davanti’s people bringing complementary skills across all facets and at every point of the engagement.

Darryl says, “We Have a strong strategic relationship with Davanti, which has built upon our established Salesforce partnership and now expanded across all our digital channels. The way we’ve partnered, and the fact that we’ve had all these skills available to us under ‘one roof’ is a big part of our success.

“We had real engagement in the team, working as one – from strategic advisory, digital expertise to design and experience capability. Having all this expertise on its own is helpful but being connected across one big team meant we were never short of the brainpower and the experience to make sure we were making good decisions. “This project is one of the best examples I’ve seen where design and delivery are closely connected to deliver the intended result – with architects, designers and developers all on the same page from start to finish.”

THE RESULT: A PLATFORM FIT FOR THE FUTURE

“The website is clean, simple, modern and easy to use – that’s what our customers have been telling us so far,” Darryl says. “And those were the words we wrote down when we started with that blank piece of paper.”

With their new CMS in place for the public sites, tightly integrated with the Salesforce community portals for the delivery of self-service, Waste Management now has a powerful, open and extensible platform that enables a better digital experience for its customers with considerably less effort – helping Waste Management get closer to its customers, responsively, and with ease.

The CMS provides Waste Management, “a solid foundation for the future and the ability to keep adding exponential value for our customers, with a roadmap that is driven by our customers’ needs.”

The launch of the new website is just the beginning, Darryl explains, as Waste Management looks ahead to the next phases in its digital journey, where it will look at enabling greater customer personalisation, self-service, creating a seamless omnichannel experience and – above all – a continued commitment to customer-centricity, ease of engagement and value.

“We’re super excited – and it doesn’t stop here. We now have the ability to constantly get better and add more value, quickly, which was something we wanted from the outset,” he says.

THE TECHNOLOGY

• Optimizely CMS

Easy-to-use, yet powerful content management system, enabling Waste Management to be agile and adapt to customer and business needs across their public websites.

• Salesforce Community Portals

Complimenting Optimizely CMS by providing Waste Management with the ability to quickly deliver rich, self-service commerce capabilities to their customers, tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM.

“We’re super excited – and it doesn’t stop here. We now have the ability to constantly get better and add more value, quickly, which was something we wanted from the outset.”

– Darryl Michaux, Customer and Digital Delivery Manager, Waste Management