What keeps your CEO awake at night – perhaps customer behaviour, tenant engagement, reporting, regulatory governance, viability compliance, keeping in line with KPI statistics, fraud detection and GDPR, to name just a few?
Orchard Data Value services
We look for patterns and analyse performance and behaviour to deliver tangible, actionable results fast, so you can use them to improve your business performance. We can show you how to get the most out of the data you already have and make sense of the many different sources available to your organisation, covering data collection, data qualification, understanding, storage and analytics.
Data value diminishes over time
Data value is time-limited; the amount of insight and value that can be realised from your data will diminish over time.
It’s not all about historical trend analysis that can be mapped; the true value in data is what can be forecast, modelled or predicted. Historical data has its place in providing analysis and trends but the true value may well have already been lost.
Fixing your challenges
Our long-standing and deep knowledge of the challenges facing housing providers, together with our experience of applying analytics and data to tackle diverse business challenges is a perfect solution for your organisation. Orchard Data Value can help you with your biggest challenges:
- Accountability to the housing regulator;
- Improving tenants’ lives;
- Better managing your housing stock.
Accountability to the housing regulator
Are you struggling to evidence your organisation’s level of viability and governance, concerned about an upcoming in-depth assessment or do you want to stress test your business plans and predict their effects?
Orchard can draw together your trusted data sources and provide a shared, interactive dashboard of your key metrics including operating margin, gearing, new housing supply and headline cost per unit. Machine learning algorithms create multiple potential ‘what if?’ scenarios, quickly showing predicted effects, historic performance, Housemark benchmarks and forecast results, thereby transforming your boardroom dialogues.
Regulators typically want to know the following:
- How does an organisation arrive at its decisions, and does it have good governance? These will be particularly important and scrutinised in a post-Grenfell world.
- Will an organisation survive if the unexpected happens; i.e. is it durable and is it viable?
- Is an organisation providing good service to its customers, offering good quality and delivering good value for money?
KPIs are all about the contributory factors
How can you best prepare to improve a KPI, and what do you need to know?
- Understand which things are contributing most to the score – for example, if you capture a satisfaction score every time you have had any contact with a customer, then the part of your business that has the greatest number of contacts with your customers will contribute the biggest proportion to the customer satisfaction KPI, so that’s an obvious consideration.
- Compare scores across several business areas that each contribute to the overall score – is one getting particularly low scores, why might that be, and is it something that you could address relatively easily to make a significant increase to the overall score?
- What is the relationship between the impact you can have and the cost to actually achieve that improvement? The Orchard Data Value team can help you calculate this.
Improving customer satisfaction
It’s important to think about the timeline of your business; if you want to improve customer satisfaction within the next six months, then a major new-building programme probably isn’t the answer, but perhaps allocating more staff to get more repairs dealt with faster might be.
What does the regulator need to know?
The measures on this dashboard are taken from the regulator’s governance and viability model, put together to help senior leaders in an organisation like yours to gain confidence that:
- They have an accurate picture of their recent performance;
- They know where they stand against an established benchmark such as Housemark;
- They aren’t getting close to ‘danger areas’;
- Their future plans are bringing about the type of performance they want.
Behind the scenes, we take your data and create a set of models, so we can also provide you with ‘what if?’ modelling linked with your dashboard through a set of sliders. This lets you see the impact on your plans if, say, the cost of house building rises by 15 per cent or rental income starts to fall. Can you imagine how visibility like that could transform your board meetings?
Improving tenants’ lives
To allow you to have a deeper understanding of your tenants, you need to join up a lot of data sources; a big part of our skill is often therefore in joining up lots of messy data to work out the answers to key questions.
One of the techniques we then use to make sense of the results is to create ‘personas’ which are like stereotypes of people who behave in certain ways, and we use those to help us communicate what we mean to business people. The personas’ names describe how the groups behave.
What might persona-based insights mean for you? It could help you to predict which tenants are likely to fall into debt, allowing you to adjust communications and support to help the individuals plan their finances. Orchard Income Analytics software is transforming how income teams are working.
David Curran, income manager, First Ark, said, “Our welfare reform and universal credit teams discuss rent accounts during every customer visit. We’ve always been hampered by the lack of a suitable mobile solution. Orchard Income Analytics offers us the perfect solution, giving our officers the ability display a rent account on their iPad within the tenant’s home. It provides a visual depiction of their rent account and the ability to add a note summarising their discussion, all of which will feedback direct into Orchard Housing. Being able to use the system in this way will give us significant efficiency savings.”
Better managing housing stock
Many senior executives are worried about high levels of voids that are costing the organisation money. Short-notice departures from tenants lead to maintenance-capacity planning issues, so ideally wouldn’t you like to be able to predict voids and ‘at risk’ properties 18 months in advance?
Orchard uses sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to find the strongest predictors of voids, helping you decide on preventative action. This insight helps organisations to plan property refits and deploy maintenance teams more efficiently. Our methods allow you to plot each property or your whole estate onto an interactive map, highlighting current voids and properties at risk with the ability to drill down to the detail of the required repairs.
So don’t suffer from sleepless nights; Orchard can help you to unlock the value of the data in your organisation to make sense of your situation and provide the evidence you need to make key business decisions.
Richard Harrison is head of service products at Orchard, and Jefferson Lynch is the client development director at Red Olive.
