Wolverhampton Homes has developed an app that makes it easier for tenants to manage their homes, writes Sam Dugmore
For a resident who needs to report a broken extractor fan or reschedule a boiler service, finding the time to contact their housing provider during office hours can be yet another headache.
The risk is that if there’s a perception that contacting a housing provider is a chore, residents might start to feel they are not receiving the best possible service – particularly when they are used to carrying out other aspects of their life admin quickly and easily online.
When a resident can do their supermarket shop, check their bank balance, or book a train ticket in the early hours before the rest of the family wakes up, then why shouldn’t they be able to track their housing repairs in this way, too?
More convenience, less stress
In the age of smarter service delivery, it was becoming increasingly important for us to give our residents a better way to engage with us.
As an Arm’s Length Management Organisation (ALMO), Wolverhampton Homes manages most of the council homes across the city of Wolverhampton, including tenanted and leasehold properties. That’s a total of around 21,000 households, including tenanted and leasehold properties.
Every household has its own rhythms, schedules and routines, and this shapes the way each resident prefers to manage their housing needs. That’s why we decided to give residents an easy, stress-free and more personalised way to interact with us.
Instead of simply giving residents yet another digital channel to navigate, we wanted a system that could understand, respond and adapt to residents’ differing needs, depending on who was using it and which services mattered to them.
It works like a supermarket app, which remembers your favourites and suggests them before you even start your order.
Better connections for residents
Many residents already expect to manage the basics of housing from their phone. Being able to make payments, track a rental balance or request simple maintenance visits is just the start.
Our goal was to provide something more meaningful. Introducing a new app was the ideal opportunity to help residents to feel more connected, not just to the housing services they use every day, but to the communities they live in.
The more our residents use the NEC Engage app, which is part of our housing management platform, the more the app learns about what is important to people. It then tailors the content based on their previous activity, and offers them information that is relevant to them, their neighbourhoods and their lives.
Rather than being bombarded with irrelevant content, or having to scroll endlessly to search for information, we can now connect people with the information they need to manage their tenancy, check their eligibility for housing, and access updates on improvements to their community.
Insight into changing needs
As a social housing provider, we want to make it as simple as possible for residents to get in touch. But we also want to understand what services they would like us to provide, and to gather residents’ views on a whole range of housing related issues.
The digital technology enables us to collect instant feedback from residents without having to go through a lengthy survey process. Asking residents for their views through the app is much like inviting customers to rate their supermarket delivery service with a quick tap after their goods arrive.
The feedback feature highlighted to us some of the issues which resonate most with residents and their communities. For instance, several households asked us to provide a way for them to report fly-tipping in their local areas.
We alerted our development team to the request, so we could add a fly-tipping reporting service to the platform. This all happened much more quickly than would have been possible with a more manual process.
It’s important for residents to see that their housing provider is ready to listen to, and act on, feedback. This provides residents with the much-needed confidence to engage with us more regularly, so they can identify where change can improve local communities.
Improved response and efficiency
Introducing a new tool or technology can be a big step. However, in our case, there was clearly an appetite among residents for an easier way to access housing services. The uptake of the app has been encouraging, with more than 32,000 downloads so far.
The impact has been overwhelmingly positive. With more residents choosing to use the app, we’ve seen a corresponding fall in incoming emails. In fact, our email traffic has been cut in half. There has also been a 90% reduction in social media messages, and we are receiving 15% fewer calls.
As a result, our team members have more time to spend responding to the emails and calls that come in from residents who prefer to contact us in this way.
When you make it easy for residents to contact you, they are much more likely to get in touch to do things like reschedule repairs. The advantage for us is far fewer missed appointments, and cases where maintenance teams arrive when nobody is home.
This enables us to deliver a much more efficient service as team members are automatically updated with any appointment changes or new information, so they can adjust maintenance rotas straight away, and divert teams to other jobs.
Removing friction from daily life
With so many day-to-day interactions becoming easier and more streamlined, it has become more important than ever to help residents manage their homes in the most straightforward way possible.
Whether residents are booking a repair to their boiler or reporting a leaking tap, their experience should be as easy as ordering a pizza. And with technology that continues to evolve, housing providers gain a richer understanding of the people they support, so they can be more responsive to the changing needs of their residents and communities.
Main image: Sam Dugmore is systems development and support manager at Wolverhampton Homes
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