Case Study: Coastal Waste & Recycling

Coastal Waste & Recycling is one of the Southeast’s fastest-growing independent solid waste and recycling companies, serving approximately 450,000 residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal customers across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. A year into its NiCE CXone journey, operations were still fragmented. Routing queues were static, agents toggled between systems, and critical knowledge lived in binders, spreadsheets, and buried Teams chats. An entry-level data entry specialist saw the gap from inside the work and was given the access to close it. What was built over the following twelve months let Coastal absorb a 90,000-home municipal contract with only five temporary agents for under ninety days, without a single permanent hire.

01 BEFORE

A platform with potential. A workflow held together by paper.

Coastal Waste & Recycling was founded in 2017 and has scaled to approximately 450,000 customers across more than 40 locations, with a fleet of nearly 600 trucks serving residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal markets. The contact center behind that operation handles service setup, billing, scheduling, permitting, and municipal coordination across every territory Coastal serves.

A year ago, the platform supporting that work was new. NiCE CXone was live. The digital routing layer that had been stood up by a third-party integrator had never worked as designed and was switched off within the first week of operation. What replaced it was the simplest possible structure: one email, one inbox, one queue. Anything that needed a new inbox got a new inbox.

That approach put the operational load on paper. Binders at every desk. Printouts when urgent information needed to move. When a schedule changed or a route slipped, supervisors walked desk to desk handing out copies like classroom worksheets. If an agent didn’t know something, they walked over to someone who did, or hopped into a Teams chat. Most nights the team ended the day with fifteen to twenty-five unresolved emails carried over into the next.

The billing team had only recently come off Outlook and was still operating with the habits that came with it. Two people working the same email. Tags misread between colleagues. Emails lost in follow-up chains. Billing wasn’t reachable on the phones at all, so when a customer called in with a billing question, the call had nowhere to go.

Working the industrial email queue, Christian McFarland, a data entry specialist roughly two weeks into the job, was watching all of it. The platform’s potential was clearly there. What sat on top of it was not.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

One test project. One leader willing to hand over the keys.

The shift came from the IT Platform Owner, Dustin Meadows, who had previously managed the contact center and hired McFarland. Meadows was running the platform and a floor of agents at the same time, and he needed to delegate. He had also noticed that his new data entry hire had mastered the job quickly and was asking questions that went past it.

Access came in a specific form: Studio, CXone’s visual scripting environment, and permission to experiment. McFarland started on a test channel. Within weeks, the first real opportunity landed.

Coastal’s full-time permit specialist resigned without notice. She had been the single point of contact for filing city permits across Florida’s dense urban markets, where every new dumpster, route, and industrial setup required paperwork before a truck could move. She left a workflow behind that could not run without her: a single Outlook inbox, paper forms, relationships with city clerks, and a reference sheet listing permit turnaround times of forty-eight hours to five days across every municipality Coastal served. When she left, permits simply stopped.

“I was like, okay, I think I know enough about Studio to build out a real queue,” McFarland said. He stitched together a first end-to-end flow. A JotForm intake. A Studio routing path. A dedicated skill queue. Three to four weeks later, automated permitting was part of the normal workflow. Miami-Dade turnaround is effectively instant. Miami Beach is the only remaining holdout. Everywhere else, when a sales rep closes a new account in the morning that needs a dumpster tomorrow, the permit can be filed in ten minutes.

The first project succeeded. The platform’s real ceiling was now visible. Every build from that point on was a question of what to tackle next.

“CXone has allowed us to work together instead of being segmented departmentally. We used to have very high walls. Oh, this customer has a billing problem, I need to throw this over here and I’m never seeing it again.”

Christian McFarland

Data Entry Specialist
Coastal Waste & Recycling

03 NiCE SOLUTION

Built inside the work. Every capability solving a problem coastal had lived.

What Coastal built over the following twelve months was not a single project but a connected set of capabilities layered on top of the CXone platform. Studio was the tool. CXone’s routing engine, APIs, and agent workspace were the foundation. Every piece reinforced the last.

Dynamic skill orchestration for billing

The billing team came online next, bringing a routing problem Studio alone couldn’t solve. Supervisors had been managing their Outlook workflow by watching queue length and verbally reassigning agents. They wanted that same real-time control in CXone.

Coastal built it using CXone APIs. A script runs every fifteen minutes, checks queue length across every billing queue, and reassigns agents between their primary and secondary skills based on live demand. When a primary queue quiets, agents move automatically into where the work is. When volume spikes, they’re pulled back. No manual intervention. Fourteen to fifteen billing agents shift between work types on their own all day. “The workflows weren’t equalized before,” McFarland said. “Some people were just sitting for fifteen minutes waiting for something to happen when they could have been assigned to another skill and continuing to work.”

Contextual knowledge at the point of the interaction

The second build replaced the binders. Using Power Apps, Coastal created a knowledge base surfaced directly inside the CXone agent workspace: structured content, a search bar, mobile-friendly, embedded where agents already worked. For permits alone, the effect was immediate. Agents who had once forwarded every permit question to the specialist now handled them in flow.

The stress test came on January 1, when Coastal went live on a 90,000-home residential contract in Hernando County in Northwest Florida. The contract roughly doubled the residential customer base overnight. The email queue hit 900 at its peak. New contracts bring new billing rules, new can sizes, new exception handling, and most of it was not yet documented. Agents were taking calls they didn’t have the answers to.

Coastal took the contract PDF, ran it through AI to generate a first draft of a help article, and pushed it into the agent workspace. Then came the interesting part. A workflow grabbed everything happening in the Hernando County Teams chat, ran it through AI, extracted the new procedural details the team was learning in real time, and appended them to the knowledge article daily. Every morning, the knowledge base got smarter by exactly as much as the team had learned the day before. “When an agent is on the phone, that information is just there,” McFarland said. “Instead of putting the customer on hold and going to ask somebody, they can just say: your address is in zone three, so we come on Tuesdays and Fridays.”

Integrations beyond the contact center

The third category of build connected CXone to the systems Coastal’s work depended on. Setting up a new service in Miami-Dade required a seventeen-digit parcel number from the county property appraiser, and it was never easy to find. The appraiser’s search tools rejected common address abbreviations: agents had to remember that “AVE” wouldn’t work but “AV” would. The average new account setup ran about twenty minutes, and nearly half of that was spent hunting for the parcel number.

Coastal built an ArcGIS API integration. The address from the JotForm intake runs through ArcGIS to generate coordinates, which run through the property appraiser automatically. When the contact lands on an agent’s screen, the parcel number is already there. New account setup handle time dropped forty to fifty percent.

Alongside the ArcGIS work, JotForm workflows were refactored into dynamic validation engines inside CXone, and Power Automate took over municipal processes that had previously relied on manual email chains. An AI-assisted Release of Lien workflow is days from deployment and is expected to collapse a nineteen-day backlog by parsing inbound PDFs and auto-generating the completed document before the agent touches the interaction.

04 RESULTS

A 90,000-home contract, absorbed without adding a single permanent hire

The clearest proof of what Coastal built showed up when Hernando County went live. Doubling the residential customer base in a day, while standing up billing from scratch, delivering new cans, and absorbing an entirely new set of municipal rules, would under previous conditions have required dozens of new agents. Coastal hired five. For under ninety days. No permanent backfill.

The mechanism was the priority blending layer. When queue length in Hernando County spiked on both email and phones, agents at offices in Panama City and Largo whose primary skill was something else absorbed the load only when their main queues were empty. The billing team’s skill orchestration script ran in parallel through the same window, keeping their existing lines of business healthy while the new contract came online.”

The financial numbers followed the operational ones. Two full-time specialist roles left Coastal during the build period: the permit specialist and the environmental reporting specialist. Their workflows now run inside CXone as part of the standard queue, with no backfill required. Estimated annual savings from the redeployed effort run to approximately $125,000. New account setup handle time dropped forty to fifty percent. Escalation rates fell. Repeat contacts on the digital side declined, which Coastal watches as a proxy for first-contact resolution.

The cultural shift may be the most durable result. A year ago, most of the floor didn’t believe the platform could do much. Now, agents and supervisors come to McFarland with ideas they’ve thought through themselves. “They see the potential in the product now,” McFarland said. “They know what they want it to do. People come to me being like, I know the system could do this, can it do this?”

05 FUTURE

From foundation to flywheel

Coastal is not yet running customer-facing AI in production, and the absence is deliberate. The IT Platform Owner has been explicit: the data foundation has to be right before the house goes up. That means connecting Snowflake, integrating with Salesforce, and getting the data layer clean enough that the AI use cases actually work when they launch. “If our data is not clean, it’s not going to work,” Meadows said. “We want to make sure that when we adopt, we’re doing it for the right reasons and we’re prepared for the right solutions.”

The near-term priorities are concrete. An AI-driven auto attendant is the first target, positioned to replace the IVR for the billing and collections teams and give customers a persistent relationship with a single collector rather than cycling through whoever happens to pick up. The Release of Lien automation is days from deployment and is expected to collapse the current nineteen-day backlog into same-day response, reducing the agent’s work on each document from roughly twenty minutes to five.

Further out, Coastal is preparing for a 120,000-home project scheduled to go live in October. “This 90,000-home contract was kind of like the first time we were able to sit at the cool kids table,” McFarland said. The next seat at the table is already on offer.

“The sticky notes are gone. The exception sheets are gone. What replaced them is a fully orchestrated engagement ecosystem that continuously evolves with our business and delivers faster, smarter, and more seamless experiences for our customers.”

Christian McFarland

Data Entry Specialist
Coastal Waste & Recycling