Together Housing Group has now deployed the second phase of its multi-channel customer service solution from MPLsystems with the introduction of an advanced web chat facility alongside its existing phone and email channels.
Ian Swithenbank, customer services performance team leader, Together Housing Group, said, “As the digital environment is becoming increasingly popular among our tenants, we wanted to extend our offering by introducing an online web chat solution in line with our digital access strategy.”
The web chat solution has been implemented across five of the group’s regional contact centres, comprising Chevin Housing, Green Vale Homes, Housing Pendle, Pennine Housing and Twin Valley Homes. To maintain the regional identity of each of the group’s businesses and in line with their new website developments, MPLsystems individually branded each web chat solution.
A tenant can now start a web chat conversation with the contact centre at a click of a button. MPLsystems’ iContact platform routes the enquiry to the most suitable agent, based on skill or location, connecting the tenant to the contact centre almost instantly. The agent desktop software then ‘screen pops’ all relevant tenant information onto their screen including the tenant’s initial web chat enquiry, contact details, previous contact history and any tenancy information.
Although Together Housing’s agents are only managing one web chat at a time during the deployment phase, they will eventually be able to manage up to three live web chats simultaneously. If one contact centre become busier than others, iContact will route the web chat or other form of communication to another regional team. This means Together Housing will eventually be able to work as one virtual customer service team.
Stephen Batley, group head of customer services, Together Housing Group, said, “From a business point of view, we wanted to add a web chat solution to improve access for tenants and help reduce the high volumes of calls to the contact centre agents, so we could improve overall efficiency by handling multiple queries at one time.
“Although still in early stages of the deployment, we are looking forward to seeing the impact this will have on the contact centre and what our tenants think about using this as a channel into the customer service centre.”
