I recently got an email from a customer who had read a blog of ours. In that blog I pointed out how even though for some select customers we do off site shredding, I personally was not a fan of it. I went so far as to say that I thought that on site shredding was the most secure and safe way of shredding. I did get his permission and below is a copy of his note to me:
Rupert,
I’ve been enjoying your blogs of late and am actually going to call in soon to book you for some residential shredding. I noticed in one of your blogs you mentioned that you were not a fan of off site shredding and I was hoping you could tell me why that’s the case.
Regards
Ray
It’s actually an opinion I’ve voiced often and so to Ray and to all the other people who’ve wondered why I’ve said that, here’s why. The reason I love on site shredding is simply because all the shredding gets done on site and can be witnessed by our customers. Just watching all their documents getting shredded gives them an enormous amount of piece of mind. In addition, we also of course provide our Certificate of Destruction. So from a record keeping and paper audit point of view, our customers not only shred regularly, but get to witness the process and then get sent the Certificate of Destruction.
Now off site shredding is effectively when a shredding company simply goes round to their customers to collect their papers, pack them and then take them away to get shredded. What worries me in general about off site shredding is the following:
- The customer does not get to witness the process
- Most shredding companies will go and collect papers from various companies, leaving whatever in the truck exposed (god forbid there was a break in).
- Some shredding companies outsource all their shredding which means they take these bags of confidential papers that need to be shredded and store them in some warehouse which contains an enormous shredding machine. Sometimes the shredding can happen after a couple of days leaving all those papers potentially exposed to being read.
Of course this is not something that happens commonly. In fact these stories are far and few between, however I never understand why people even take a 1% chance with private documents that are meant to be shredded.
As I mentioned earlier, for some customers we do offer off site shredding. And that’s not because it’s a cheaper option because we charge the same price for off site or on site shredding, BUT because some of our customers do not have the space for our Massive Shredding Truck to come on site and do the shredding. In those instances we take away people’s pages, park the truck a few roads away and just shred them there. It’s in ours and our customers best interest to have their private documents securely disposed of as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I know that there are some people out there that will disagree and I always welcome a healthy debate, but in my mind, our job is to ensure that our customers’ private documents are shredded quickly, efficiently and in front of their eyes.
If you currently don’t shred or do off site shredding because you feel it’s a cheaper option, call us. You’ll be pleasantly surprised as to how competitive our on site shredding prices are.