In March 2019, Midland Heart had the brilliant opportunity to share our digital journey so far with peers from across the sector at the Housing Technology 2019 conference.
Rewind to October 2017 and new to the sector from the world of retail, I was tasked with launching a portal for tenants to manage their rents. As is the norm for our sector, we had identified a third-party solution that would provide a range of fixed functionality for our tenants, requiring a significant investment in the software, plus the associated professional services for implementation, configuration and management of the project.
However, several things were clear at this early stage; specifically, that existing suppliers lacked the flexibility and responsiveness required to meet Midland Heart’s evolving technology needs, and tenants weren’t routinely involved in technology decisions.
Learning & inspiration
With this in mind, we decided to take some time to learn lessons from other organisations, visiting social housing organisations ahead of us in their digital transformation, along with looking at other markets for inspiration. From this we drew up a series of criteria essential to making a success of our customer app. We needed to:
- Put our tenants first, not technology;
- Find flexible solutions to meet tenants’ changing needs;
- Have responsive processes to make change happen quickly;
- Have the right behaviours to successfully transform our service;
- Offer tenants choice in how they interact with us;
- Involve our tenants to inform our decision making.
Trialling low code
Based on these principles, we set about assessing our options, including in-house development. A few days later, a prospective email dropped into my inbox, introducing a low-code, rapid application development package, the headlines of which broadly matched our success criteria. Intrigued to learn more, we took up the opportunity to trial the technology for free. Over the next few weeks, we assessed a few technologies and different low code platforms, formulating an approach and making the case for introducing an internal team of software developers and the procurement of low-code development software.
Our research also highlighted that just introducing a portal didn’t guarantee success; we needed to digitally transform our organisation at every level, bringing our colleagues on the journey with us, and transforming our technology services to deliver the change.
Our digital transformation programme was born.
Recruitment began to build our technology team to find the software engineers, business intelligence developers and project managers needed to help design and deliver our new customer offer and introduce agile, iterative development practices. At the same time, we set about ensuring our existing team was fully on board and we had strong development plans in place.
Thinking about the customer journey and communication touch-points, we identified a programme of changes required to deliver our digital transformation, not just new apps for our tenants and colleagues to use, but also investment in our core enabling technologies such as WAN, LAN, WLAN, mobile and unified communications.
Tenant engagement
Next, with the people, technologies and roadmap in place, we started to engage with our tenants, establishing two panels to gather their thoughts; one panel met on a regular basis at our main office, the second was a virtual panel. We worked with the group to understand what was important to them, what features they would like to see and how we could best launch the app. The group met regularly, reviewed storyboards and early prototypes and later provided testing and feedback. Our tenant group has gone on to be digital champions, promoting the system to their fellow residents.
Software development started in August 2018 and by November we had a viable product and we were into the testing phase. After a series of tests including security and accessibility, we went live in late January 2019. Since then, we’ve marketed the app via email to 1,000 tenants to learn lessons and understand trends. Early results show a 36 per cent take-up and 90 per cent repeat use, which we expect will grow as marketing activities increase and we begin to actively convert tenants. The next stages of rollout will include promotion on our social media and website as well as on rent statements to be mailed out to customers later this year.
Meanwhile, the software engineering team has moved on and launched a contact management system for our customer hub and will launch a colleague app in April 2019 – bringing with it the ability for those in the field to report issues they see with our properties, allowing Midland Heart to provide a much more proactive service for our tenants.
Seamless data flows
All of our solutions are interconnected via a suite of micro-service APIs, allowing data to flow seamlessly between them and making change easy to effect. We have also linked the solution to our housing management system via the same micro-services, ensuring we maintain a single 360-degree view of our tenants in order to provide a connected service.
With low-code, we have quadrupled the speed of our software development and are now well placed to deliver low-cost, responsive solutions to our business in the coming years.
Next up is an online letting system that will allow our tenants to view and apply for homes, while automating many of the manual processes associated with that, in turn freeing up time for staff to better serve our tenants.
Kathryn Downs is the director of technology and transformation at Midland Heart.
