Broadacres Housing has opted for Salesforce to improve its money advice service, with the aim of helping to maintain its tenancies and supporting tenants with the current cost of living crisis.
Mark Birch, head of ICT, Broadacres Housing, said, “Many of our residents are working, but given the current economy, some of them may still need and be eligible for extra financial support from a variety of agencies, but accessing those benefits can be confusing and time-consuming. That’s where our money advice service team comes in; they work with people to support them with budgeting and navigating the system to find out about possible financial benefits.
“As part of our selection of Salesforce, we knew that we needed a technology platform that was global and used by different industries, and we wanted something ‘low code/no code’ that we could actually use ourselves, shape to our needs, and turn around quite quickly. In addition, the non-profit licensing from Salesforce was a big plus.”
Working with implementation specialists Alscient, the Salesforce implementation project for Broadacres began in March 2022 and took just a few months to complete.
With Salesforce, tenants can now make referrals to the money advice service via the housing provider’s website, which then creates a new case management record. The solution is integrated with Broadacres’ existing housing management system so that all service information is still kept in one central location.
Birch said, “We now have built-in dashboards covering income, tenancies and repairs so our staff can see their own performance, the team’s performance and the manager can see the overall service performance, which is something she used to spend a few days a month working on.”
Broadacres’ team of money advisors is also creating a seamless digital experience for its customers by using WhatsApp and SMS via the Salesforce platform, thereby moving from siloed information to having a bird’s eye view of all text-based communications with each customer.
Birch said, “We are now so much more efficient. If all of these time-savings were costed, they would pay for a significant part of the project, if not all of it.”
Salesforce’s Trailhead online learning platform was another factor in Broadacres’ choice of technology. By using Trailhead, Broadacres’ IT team has been able to make changes and improvements without the need for third-party resources.
Birch said, “Our Trailhead-based training really paid off when we were working out how to move our systems over to Salesforce. We’ve only added one custom object to our Salesforce platform – everything else we wanted to do, we could do straight away, such as putting in some custom fields.”
Broadacres’ other departments and teams are now enthusiastic about moving to Salesforce, with the money advice service’s implementation being used as a blueprint for future implementations.
