Breedon acquired Hope in 2016 and is a leading construction materials group in Great Britain and Ireland. We operate two cement plants and around 80 quarries, 40 asphalt plants, 170 ready-mixed concrete plants, nine concrete, and clay products plants, four contract surfacing businesses, six import/export terminals, and two slate production facilities.

Three months to revolutionise Hope Cement’s customer experience

The story of how 1,000 monthly customer calls disappeared...

The challenge

Hope Cement’s existing Proof of Delivery (POD) process was beginning to cause serious problems for the business. The laborious system involved two full-time members of staff having to locate the correct paperwork and email the POD to the customer after that customer had called Credit Control to request it.

On average, Hope Cement was receiving 1,000 of these calls each month. It was an expensive and unsustainable system.

How we helped

Our answer was to let the customer complete the POD themselves. We created and hosted a ‘self-serve’ portal that was integrated with a third party scanning partner and displayed the POD for the customer. Reporting functionality was also added so that customers could report issues.

Meeting Hope Cement’s tight deadline of three months, 1,000 customer calls per month became zero calls.

The results

As well as a much-improved customer experience, there was also significantly less pressure on the Credit Control team. And cost savings were achieved as the resources to deal with calls were no longer required.