Even before flexible working became the norm, housing providers were looking at what was needed to empower their remote and mobile workforces. In our post-pandemic world, digitising even faster will improve mobility and agility for workers as well as enabling supportive and better service delivery to tenants.
True transformation has to put tenants’ needs and experience at the heart of digitised change, rather than designing change around technology and old ways of working. Throughout 2021 Aareon held strategy workshops with housing providers to design and co-produce our new portfolio to meet these new and emerging requirements.
Our fully integrated mobile approach is aligned to the seven key themes housing providers raised in those workshops.
Data and integration
Data must work in real time even when mobile, enabling a consistent single source of truth for tasks and activity associated to your tenants and assets. Powered by an extensive integration layer, we have built this into our new Versaa mobile solutions so they work seamlessly across our portfolio and into other external systems. This means that when anything is updated, it’s immediately available across your entire application ecosystem rather than field-operatives working from an old download of information.
Automation
Automation of business processes used in the field is needed so that your staff can focus on helping tenants rather than getting caught up in repetitive, manual tasks. When workflow is automatically triggered by updates and scheduling tools such as the ones used in Versaa, a simplified, automated and intuitive experience for your staff results in better-supported tenants and improved experiences.
Mobility & agility
Housing providers are keen to empower their workforces to undertake vital operational tasks in their communities. When actions can be taken in real time, even while still with the tenant, updates can be provided shortly after or even during a visit. This really drives greater customer satisfaction, avoids escalations and also boosts staff efficiency and staff satisfaction levels.
Insight
Housing providers want feedback in real time in the form of actionable insights to help their decision-making and prioritisation. Powerful insights are achieved in Versaa by collecting data which is analysed and can be reported on in standard and customer-configured reports. Being able to act on emerging trends and prioritise repairs that impact multiple or vulnerable tenants was raised in many of the strategy workshops we held in 2021.
Differentiation
The authentication and validation of tenant information is vital for your staff to operate securely and with a personal touch when working in their communities. Being aware of differing tenant needs to focus on the most vulnerable people or time-critical actions can make all the difference to your tenants and their families. At the same time, being able to check such information and receive alerts while mobile helps to keep your people safe as well as helping to maintain the well-being of your tenants.
Omnichannel
Tenants expect to have access to information 24/7 and to be able to make requests or book appointments at times when it suits them best. Our new portfolio of portal and app solutions is also powered by our Versaa platform to make these easy to deliver, plus the updated information is available immediately in our mobile working solutions so your field-based staff always have the latest information.
Versaa-powered mobile transformation
To meet our customers’ mobile working requirements, we have created an enhanced, low-code mobile working platform designed specifically for social housing. Versaa empowers your staff to easily build mobile working solutions for any business process, with fully-integrated mobile working to multi-task and provide vital field-based support. Versaa also provides ‘anytime and anywhere’ app and portal services for tenants, matching the requests housing providers made during our strategy workshops.
Evolving from its highly-regarded predecessor (1st Touch), our Versaa Mobile platform brings mobile working into a new era. Re-architected to meet the latest cloud computing principles, it brings a range of new capabilities and benefits:
- Remote working for staff and contractors – remote workers and operatives can use a range of mobile forms to complete tasks, process data and automate responses to your back-office systems using our out-of-the box solutions. Every housing provider has their own specific requirements and we support this in our new configuration toolset in the management studio.
- Digitise rapidly – all housing providers benefit from digital forms as part of their processes and Versaa makes this easy, either with pre-designed templates for standard housing tasks or letting organisations easily build their own forms and workflows from scratch if they want to. The Mobile Modules are out of the box, ready to deploy solutions, designed to digitise processes in the field quickly with limited configuration.
- New features & Workflow Designer – Customer feedback highlighted the need for easy-to-use visual solutions, so Versaa and its many new features focus on driving a better experience. Our new Workflow Designer has visualised workflows with an intuitive business process model and notation (BPMN) compliant interface. Integrated services mean you can automate complex procedures effortlessly between crucial business systems too.
More than ever, housing providers need cost-effective problem-solving and new service solutions, catering for an ever-changing mobile working environment, and Versaa has arrived to do just that.
With so much of our working life now happening beyond traditional offices, whether working remotely or fully mobile, isn’t it time you planned a mobile transformation to benefit your staff and your tenants?
Tina Kennedy is head of digital at Aareon UK.
