Challenge
What happens to the soap after a guest checks out of their hotel? This question posed by frequent business traveler, Shawn Seipler, inspired a green movement. He embraced the opportunity to turn one man’s trash into another’s life-saving treasure. Clean the World is the result of that vision. It’s mission: “Recycling soap to save lives.” Concepta became a partner in that mission by providing a new automated system for interaction with their hotel partners. This automation means Clean the World can now bring on thousands more hospitality partners and improve customer service at the same time.
Solution
How It Works The collection process is simple.The housekeeping teams gather the leftover hygiene items after a guest checks and deposit them into dedicated bins. When the bins fill up, the hotels submit a request for pickup. The bins are then swapped for empty ones and the full bins get shipped back to a Clean the World facility. The sorted soap is then ground down, treated with a proven disinfecting process, reformed into brand new bars and distributed to underprivileged families in over 128 countries. Popularity Problems With substantial growth came an increased need for a tool that would help with logistics. A manual system for requesting bins, printing shipping labels and viewing impact statements would no longer suffice. They needed a tool that would create a good customer experience while streamlining logistics. Their previous model required reliance on direct contact. A staffer had to address every request, even for a routine shipping label. This was easy to do when Clean the World was small, but as they grew it became progressively unmanageable. Clean the World needed a better way to facilitate shipments and demonstrate impact to their growing network of partners. Programming Around Bottlenecks After identifying the main bottlenecks in Clean the World’s process, Concepta went to work on an ambitious solution. They designed a digital platform that provides hospitality partnersreal-time, round-the-clock, direct access to Clean the World’s services. Requesting new bins is now an automated process that generates shipping labels and orders new bins on demand.The need for frequent direct contact has been eliminated. Hotel staff can simply sign in, print labels, and schedule the exact bins they need. Most exciting is the mobile-responsive Impact Portal. Partners can pull up live, site-specific metrics illustrating exactly how much they’ve accomplished. The feature was one of Clean the World’s priorities, says Sandy Beauchamp, VP of Marketing.
Results
The online portal went live on December 4, 2018, and the impact has been transformative. Where there were once 10 people responsible for adding new partners manually, on-boarding is now an efficiently automated process. In one day, Clean the World on-boarded over 4,000 hotels - a feat which would have been impossible under the old system. In a year’s time, Clean the World’s online portal has grown to over 20,000 users. Freed from tedious tasks, Clean the World can focus their efforts on higher quality customer service.
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