The social housing sector is almost unique in the way organisations share learning and expertise, supporting each other to evolve and improve. This year, a key theme of Voicescape’s annual customer conference was the growing opportunity to unify data and allow it to flow across systems and departments, creating more consistent, customer-centric services.
Moving beyond fragmented services
It’s no secret that while housing providers have always tried to listen to and act on the voices of their residents, they have often struggled to gain a truly holistic view.
Fragmented interactions across multiple teams and systems have historically resulted in customers providing information to one department that never reaches another, even when both departments interact with the same individual.
The outcome can be frustrated customers who are forced to give the same information multiple times and needlessly-duplicated workloads for housing staff. Most importantly, this lack of a unified customer perspective has hindered the development of more proactive and linked-up services that can support tenants based on their current and future needs, preventing problems before they arise.
This situation isn’t due to a lack of foresight or concern; until recently, integrating the specialised technology stacks of housing providers’ different business units, each tailored to meet their own requirements, has been an incredibly difficult job.
Aiming for a singular view
Technological advances are now making it increasingly possible to link and unite datasets across departments and functions, benefiting both housing providers and tenants. The significant opportunities this can present was a consistent theme across our recent conference.
One of our speakers, Matt Baird from the Social Housing Round Table, highlighted how these new innovations, somewhat ironically, are encouraging housing providers to return to basics and focus on getting the fundamentals right for customers.
For the first time, as it becomes possible to log more interactions in one place and join up data, housing providers can get a broader customer picture and transform raw information into actionable insights on customers as a whole, rather than a series of isolated interactions, to drive better results.
Importantly, this doesn’t necessarily demand huge investment in an enterprise ‘super system’ to integrate everything because there’s value in more agile and cost-effective approaches that can tackle the unique challenges facing housing providers in very bespoke ways.
Thirteen Group’s housing services manager, Caroline Harraway, echoed this sentiment. She discussed her organisation’s mission to efficiently achieve a single view of the customer – delivering a consistent, connected service wherever and however individuals choose to engage.
At the moment, Thirteen’s multiple systems look and feel different and can cause confusion and inefficiency. Customer service teams might only see isolated snippets of a resident’s information without a full picture, while customers attempting to self-serve can become frustrated as they are moved from one platform to another.
To address this, Thirteen is taking strides towards a single platform, bringing all information into one place. The goal is to help its staff resolve problems more efficiently and enable customers to more effectively self-serve.
Automation plays a key role here, with Thirteen embedding AI and automation technologies, such as Voicescape’s Caseload Manager, to proactively identify problems and free up resources so staff can spend more time with the customers who need it most.
The importance of co-creation
At Yorkshire Housing, the entire organisation is rethinking its approach, as its head of customer service delivery, Angela Havens, explained. Recognising that customers are struggling amid a cost-of-living crisis, Yorkshire Housing is using data to reshape its services to help tenants regain stability.
Previously, areas such as rent collection and arrears management were reactive and reliant on manual interventions, which added little real value and took time away from the customers who truly needed help. To address this, Yorkshire Housing worked with Voicescape to implement a more collaborative and proactive system that gains the right information at the right time to deliver better outcomes.
By introducing Voicescape Collections and Caseload Manager, Yorkshire Housing can capture, share and flag useful information in a way that previously wasn’t possible, enabling better preventative and pre-emptive interactions.
Customer-obsessed services
This leads to more targeted working methods and streamlined processes for customers. For example, as a result of employing this approach in income analytics and collections, Yorkshire Housing has maintained a strong position of two per cent arrears despite a challenging economic environment.
Yorkshire Housing’s Angela Havens emphasised the importance of engaging customers in shaping services through co-creation. She also clarified that introducing automated systems isn’t about reducing staff numbers; instead, it enables housing providers to free up time to deliver ‘customer-obsessed services’ and proactively resolve tenants’ problems.
The power of residents’ voices
We closed our conference by discussing Voicescape’s own focus on closing the loop on data collection and consolidating all information in one place for our customers. In particular, we shared our mission to integrate data across our suite of products, from income analytics and collections to compliance and engagement, in order to fully harness the power of residents’ voices.
While the social housing sector hasn’t yet achieved a true ‘single view of the customer,’ many housing providers are progressing towards more consistent, efficient and proactive approaches to customer services and problem resolution via greater data integration.
It’s an exciting prospect, with automated engagement, data collection and analytics platforms playing a crucial role in making this vision a reality.
Gary Haynes is the managing director of Voicescape.
