Granger Waste Services

Granger Waste Services provides businesses and families throughout Michigan with fast, reliable trash and recycling services. With a growing customer base, Granger employees were spending more and more time fielding questions and scheduling service over the phone. They were looking for a way to streamline service requests so they could continue to grow their business without adding hours of customer service time.

Objective: Streamline Customer Service and Support

Granger’s customer service team was becoming overwhelmed with service and support requests by phone. Customers weren’t able to request or change their trash or recycling service without a phone call, which sometimes meant waiting in long phone queues. Granger needed a way to reduce phone call volume for their staff and make service requests easier for their customers. They were looking for an easy-to-use online platform built into their website to address questions and requests.

What We Did

The Web Ascender team addressed the high volume of service requests in multiple ways. By setting up an accessible, organized, prominent knowledge base of common questions on their website, many customers could answer their own question online without submitting a service request at all. We also added a website chat feature, allowing customer service representatives to address multiple queries at once and removing long waiting times on the phone. Finally, the team designed and built a custom Ruby-on-Rails-based online client portal to integrate with Granger’s website, allowing customers to view their invoices and services, make payments, and make changes online.

• Built out an accessible knowledge base to answer common questions without a service request
• Integrated an online chat feature to allow customers and service representatives to resolve questions without a phone call
• Built a custom customer portal where customers can view and pay bills, change services, and more, without calling a representative

The Customer Portal, Up Close

What started as a client portal has grown into the platform Granger runs its customer relationships on. It’s a Ruby on Rails application that sits in front of Granger’s back-office billing system, importing account, invoice, payment, and service data daily, and gives customers a self-service experience while giving Granger staff internal tools built on the same data.

For customers

• Sign in their way - password, magic link, or Microsoft login, then a dashboard with the latest invoice, latest payment, and upcoming pickups
• Invoices and payment history - every invoice with line-item detail and PDF download, synced from billing
• Pay online, or never think about it again - one-time payments by credit card or bank draft, or monthly autopay that runs on scheduled jobs, sends reminders, and handles expired cards and retries automatically, with bank batches generated in the standard ACH file format and accounts validated before the first draft
• Order service without an account - a public ordering flow for recurring residential trash and recycling, bulk pickups, and temporary containers that geocodes the address against service-area polygons to determine availability and price on the spot
• Manage the account - seasonal holds for snowbirds, email and SMS notification preferences, multiple accounts under one login, and terms acceptance

For Granger staff

• Portal admin - account lookup, reviewing and assigning incoming service requests, imports and exports, announcements, blackout dates, release notes, notification logs, and customer impersonation for support
• Service area and pricing maps - staff load GIS shapefiles and KML, draw layers, and set per-layer prices and surcharges that drive the public ordering flow
• A commercial sales CRM - organizations, contacts, locations, and deals with a service configurator, territories, commission rates, and generated PDF proposals with e-signature, plus forecasting, pipeline, and sales activity reports
• Landfill tools - haul manifests, waste profile lookups, and a separate app for creating and approving waste profiles
• Marketing campaigns - such as a sign-up drive for billing improvements

Integrations and infrastructure

• Contact center integration - an API that lets the phone system look up accounts and take payments, with webhooks that tie call conversations to portal users
• Payments and messaging - card processing, ACH through Granger’s bank, and email and SMS delivery, all behind clean integrations that can be swapped as vendors change
• Geospatial data on PostGIS, file storage in the cloud, background jobs, feature flags for staged rollouts, and containerized deployment to cloud infrastructure

Key Results

Granger’s customer service team is no longer overwhelmed by calls. With hundreds of hours saved each week, their team can take on more pressing tasks. Customers are also adding and making changes to their own accounts, making it easier than ever to grow their customer base. These improvements gave Granger a modern, service-based website and plenty of room to grow in the future.

• 75% more website visits in 2025 than in 2024
• 1,000+ service inquiries handled through the website per month
• An estimated 200+ hours of customer service time saved per week