0 to 4
Confirmed pickups in week one
60+ kg
E-waste kept out of landfills in week one
2+ weeks to seconds
Time from inquiry to response
About the company
EwasteRJ
Rafa Jafar founded EwasteRJ in 2014 when he was eleven years old. The idea was straightforward: make it easy for anyone in Indonesia to responsibly hand off their old electronics instead of throwing them away. More than a decade later, EwasteRJ operates 13 disposal sites across the country, including Surabaya, Makassar, and Yogyakarta, and partners with Teknotama Lingkungan Indonesia for certified recycling. The team is small, young, and always moving. Every week they are running collections, sorting devices, managing logistics, and building the corporate partnerships that will expand the operation city by city. The inbox was always going to be the last thing anyone got to.
The Challenge
EwasteRJ's problem was not demand. People wanted to donate their devices. The messages were coming in. Nobody was there to answer them, because the team was out doing the actual work.
01
The team could not be in two places.
When the staff is sorting devices in Bekasi or running a pickup in South Jakarta, the WhatsApp inbox is not getting checked. By the time someone opened it, the donor had already given up and thrown the devices away. The gap between inquiry and reply was measured in weeks, not hours.
02
75 messages went unanswered. Zero pickups happened.
This was not a performance failure. It was a structural one. The channel existed. The demand existed. The team did not have the hours to work both. Every unanswered message was a device that ended up in a landfill.
03
There was no system to keep up when the team was in the field.
No auto-reply. No routing logic. No follow-up cadence. Donors who messaged and heard nothing had no reason to try again. The organisation was losing the people who most wanted to help.
75 chats, 0 pickups
Seventy-five inbound conversations produced zero confirmed pickups. Replies arrived, if at all, two weeks after the original message.
2+ week response time
By the time anyone got to the inbox, donors had already disposed of their items another way. The team was always in the field doing the actual work.
No courier dispatch system
Every pickup that did get confirmed required a staff member to arrange manually — no automation, no scheduling, no consistency.
No reactivation process
Donors who messaged and heard nothing were never contacted again. There was no way to recover the existing backlog of 75 unreplied conversations.
What Covena Built: An Autonomous Pickup Coordinator on WhatsApp
Covena handled the build, training, and deployment end-to-end. The EwasteRJ team did not write a single prompt.
Individual Donor and Corporate Batch Intake
Individual donors and organisations scheduling bulk collections — schools, offices, companies retiring equipment — are handled through the same channel, with separate qualification flows for volume, device types, and access logistics.
Autonomous Last-Mile Courier Dispatch via Lalamove and GoJek
The AI confirms device types, quantity, and donor location, then dispatches a rider through Lalamove or GoJek in the same thread. No calls, no manual routing. The AI books the courier.
E-Waste Item Triage Before Dispatch
The AI identifies device types and volume before confirming a pickup, so courier capacity and handling match the actual job. No mismatched runs, no wasted trips.
Inactive Donor Reactivation
Donors who sent a message weeks ago and never heard back receive a proactive follow-up, with the original thread context intact. Many of them were still willing to donate. They just needed someone to finally respond.
Field Team Operations Support
EwasteRJ's team gets confirmed, scheduled pickups delivered to their log, not a backlog of raw inquiries to work through. The inbox handles itself so the team can stay focused on the mission.
The AI in Action
See how the agent turns inbound donor messages into confirmed, dispatched pickups — without any staff involvement.
Upload image for "Individual Donor — Late-Night Pickup Booking"
How We Got to Live in 6 Weeks
Weeks 1–2
Discovery & Operations Mapping
Pickup flow documented, device triage logic designed, courier dispatch integration scoped with Lalamove and GoJek, and donor reactivation sequence planned against the existing 75-chat backlog.
Weeks 3–4
Agent Build & Courier Integration
Lalamove and GoJek dispatch integrated, donor intake qualification built, reactivation sequence configured with full thread context carried forward.
Week 5
Testing & Field Validation
End-to-end pickup scenarios tested with EwasteRJ's field team. Triage accuracy, courier dispatch timing, and edge cases — bulk batches, school collections, multi-device drops — validated.
Week 6
Go Live & Iteration
Full inbound traffic handed to the agent. EwasteRJ's team received confirmed pickups in their schedule, not an inbox to manage.
The Impact
The demand was always there. The channel just could not process it.
0 to 4
Confirmed Pickups in Week One
From 35 conversations, where 75 prior chats had produced zero.
60+ kg
E-Waste Kept Out of Landfills
In week one alone, with no staff coordination hours spent.
0
Staff Hours per Pickup
Intake, triage, dispatch, and follow-up handled end-to-end by the agent.
2+ weeks to seconds
Time From Inquiry to Response
Donors who messaged at 9pm had a courier confirmed before midnight.
Metric
Before
After
After-hours coverage
None
Full
Follow-up for unreplied donors
None
Automated with full thread context
Courier booking
Manual calls by staff
Dispatched by AI via Lalamove/GoJek
Bulk and corporate collections
No routing
Separate qualification flow, auto-scheduled
Staff inbox load
Every inquiry required a human
Completed pickups delivered to schedule
What's Next
With coordination fully automated, the EwasteRJ team is back where the mission lives: expanding city coverage, building corporate collection partnerships, and increasing throughput at sorting facilities. Every device that would have ended up in a landfill because nobody answered in time now has a path to certified recycling. The inbox handles itself.
Building something mission-critical on a lean team?
See how Covena builds AI agents that handle the ops so your team can focus on the mission.