In one of the largest mobile implementations in the social housing sector, Wakefield and District Housing is implementing Capita TotalMobile across its operations to allow employees to access all of the systems they use in the office while out visiting tenants. The contract is valued at £475,000 over five years.
Following the introduction of the government’s welfare reform programme, WDH selected its central debt team as the test-bed for Capita TotalMobile in the middle of 2013, followed by its allocations team towards the end of the year. The system will be rolled out to WDH’s neighbourhoods, cyclical servicing, repairs and wellbeing teams during 2014.
Geoff Kirk, service director for business systems, Wakefield and District Housing, said, “The use of mobile technology has been vital in helping our central debt team absorb the additional workload resulting from welfare reform. With employees able to get the information they need on smartphones or tablets while out and about in the community, they can respond faster to tenants’ enquiries, access the information they need, and agree payment arrangements without having to travel back to the office.
“Within weeks of using TotalMobile, we saw significant results in our debt team, gaining between a day and a day and a half per week for each debt officer working out of the office. This has enabled them to carry out over 200 extra debt visits per week, and maintain our overall arrears within our pre-welfare reform target rate. And although tenancy terminations have increased by 20 per cent as a result of the bedroom tax, we have been able to maintain our average turnaround time to less than 20 days.”
