User Satisfaction Surveys

Waste and recycling sites across West Yorkshire sought to improve service quality. Our objective was to gather user feedback and translate it into actionable improvements.

This strand of the research concerned waste and recycling sites in West Yorkshire. Its focus was the experience of residents using those services, including the practical aspects of a visit that shape whether a site feels accessible, clear and well managed.

Gathering feedback from users gave the authority evidence from the people encountering the service directly. It provided a basis for considering local improvements alongside operational knowledge, rather than assuming that the aspects easiest to monitor internally were necessarily those most important to residents.

We designed and conducted structured satisfaction surveys, capturing residents’ experiences across categories such as accessibility, cleanliness, and staff behaviour.

The questionnaire brought several dimensions of the visit into a common structure. Accessibility, cleanliness and staff behaviour could be considered separately, while contributing to an overall picture of the user experience.

This made the results more useful than a single general satisfaction question. When feedback identifies a concern, decision-makers need to understand which part of the service it relates to. The structured approach provided a way to organise residents' responses around practical areas for consideration without losing sight of the wider visit.

A total of 1,129 surveys were completed in the region, providing a comprehensive snapshot of local perceptions and satisfaction levels.

The 1,129 completed surveys belong to the West Yorkshire waste and recycling-site work. They form a separate body of evidence from the 1,184 responses gathered at East London bring sites, even though both studies sit within this wider case study.

Keeping those totals separate helps retain the local meaning of the research. The response count describes the scale of feedback collected; interpretation of individual issues still needs to consider the relevant questions and respondents rather than assuming every result represents all residents in the region.

Feedback highlighted both strengths and areas for improvement, enabling local authorities to implement changes grounded in users’ real experiences rather than assumptions.

Identifying strengths was useful alongside identifying problems. It allowed the authority to consider which parts of the service should be maintained while directing attention towards areas users felt could work better.

The research translated residents' accounts into evidence for those discussions. It supported a more specific conversation about the experience of using the sites, connecting proposed changes to feedback about accessibility, cleanliness and staff interactions rather than relying solely on an overall impression that a service needed improvement.

From clearer signage to improved queue management, the data directly informed upgrades that enhanced user satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Signage and queue management illustrate the practical nature of the improvements described in this strand. They concern how residents find their way around the service and move through their visit, linking research feedback to day-to-day operations.

The value of the survey was to provide user evidence for deciding where attention was needed. It also established a structured way of considering the experience across service areas. The documented contribution was to inform those service changes with feedback from residents who used the sites.

East London bring-sites required detailed insights to ensure services aligned with community expectations. Our surveys aimed to give residents a voice in shaping these services.

This second strand concerned bring sites in East London. It had its own local users and service setting, so its findings are presented separately from the West Yorkshire waste and recycling-site work. The shared aim was to understand how the service was experienced by the people using it.

Resident feedback brought that perspective into discussions about service quality. It helped connect expectations of the sites with the practical aspects of the experience, giving managers and councils a user-led basis for considering where changes could be useful.

We applied the same rigorous methodology used in West Yorkshire to East London’s bring-sites, ensuring consistency in data quality and comparability across regions.

A consistent structured survey approach linked the two strands while retaining their different service contexts. The shared focus on the user experience supported an organised assessment of issues such as access, cleanliness and overall service quality.

Consistency in method does not make the locations or populations interchangeable. The East London findings should be interpreted as evidence about the bring-site users who responded, with any comparison to West Yorkshire taking account of the different settings. Retaining that local context keeps the findings useful to the teams responsible for each service.

We gathered 1,184 completed surveys from users across East London, offering a robust and actionable dataset.

The East London study achieved 1,184 completed surveys. These responses provided evidence about this service setting and its users, adding detail to the assessment of local experience.

The volume of feedback provided a substantial body of user views for identifying strengths and priorities. Keeping it separate from the West Yorkshire total makes clear which work the evidence describes, while the combined programme shows MRFGR's experience of delivering on-site satisfaction research across two different service settings.

The results empowered site managers and local councils to take timely action—improving signage, increasing staff presence, and maintaining site cleanliness more effectively.

The project account identifies signage, staff presence and cleanliness as areas where the findings informed action. These are concrete aspects of site management, making the feedback relevant to teams responsible for the everyday experience of residents.

The study's practical contribution was to bring user observations into decisions about those areas. It helped managers discuss priorities with evidence from site users, while keeping the focus on the East London service context rather than importing conclusions from the separate West Yorkshire study.

These satisfaction surveys have become a vital tool for measuring performance and guiding ongoing service improvements in both East London and West Yorkshire.

The two strands demonstrate a common research purpose with locally distinct results. West Yorkshire contributed 1,129 responses from waste and recycling-site users; East London contributed 1,184 from bring-site users. Each dataset supported consideration of the service it described.

Presenting them together shows the breadth of the programme without merging the two audiences into a single set of findings. Structured user feedback gives local teams a basis for discussing improvements and can support future monitoring when the questions and collection approach are kept sufficiently consistent.