As a new financial year approaches and in light of the recent Social Housing White Paper, Kitty Hadaway, Housing lead at customer contact innovators Futr, explores the role technology will play in enhancing the customer experience
The chancellor’s recent budget announcement finally confirmed the arrival of spring and a sector refocus after 12 tumultuous months.
The new financial year ahead offers considerably more hope than in 2020, with a roadmap to the easing of lockdown restrictions in place, aided by the continued rollout of the government’s vaccination programme.
March will no doubt see important decisions finalised on strategic investments that will shape the year ahead for housing associations and their residents.
Alongside the mitigation of any long-term impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, landlords across the country will also no doubt be taking their first steps in preparing for a new era of regulation across the sector.
At the beginning of a long and challenging winter, the government published its long-awaited social housing white paper, with a mandate for landlords to provide a consistently better and fairer service to all residents.
As the dust begins to settle on the Charter for social housing residents, now is the time to make targeted changes that will help deliver against the government’s new customer satisfaction targets.
Maintaining momentum
In Futr’s frequent conversations with landlords of all sizes over the last year, it’s been impressive to hear how quickly landlords have adapted to the unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19.
In a rapidly changing operating environment, housing associations have flexed to accommodate new ways of working and to meet the changing needs of their customers.
While digital transformation has been a priority within housing for a number of years, with residents enabled to self-serve the majority of tenancy matters independently online, the restrictions on face-to-face encounters during the pandemic has created a new sense of urgency around channel shift.
In many cases, the pandemic has helped accelerate digital transformation journeys that might otherwise have stalled. As Darren Reynolds, director for Resident Experience at Shepherds Bush Housing Group (SBHG), attests: “The pace of change last year was the equivalent of two weeks instead of two years. As a result, last year, many things that had been on our wish list were achieved, and much quicker than they might have otherwise been.”
Housing isn’t the only sector renewing its focus on digital transformation over the past 12 months. A recent study by global consultants McKinsey & Company found that businesses have spent more on digital investment than on any other business continuity measure since the start of the pandemic.
“With customers and businesses demonstrating a new appetite for remote interactions, it’s essential landlords capitalise on their recent progress to ensure residents feel empowered and confident taking control of their tenancies online”
The survey also found that the number of businesses conducting 80% or more of their customer interactions online had tripled from the start of the pandemic to December 2020.
With customers and businesses demonstrating a new appetite for remote interactions, it’s essential that landlords capitalise on their recent progress to ensure residents feel increasingly empowered and confident taking control of their tenancies online.
By ensuring that residents are supported to resolve everyday issues independently, social landlords can provide a more effective and efficient service – offering increased customer satisfaction and directly responding to the government’s ambitious White Paper targets.
Meeting new challenges
Four of the key deliverables set out in the social housing white paper are linked to the way housing associations communicate with their residents. Residents have been told they should expect to know how their landlord is performing, have complaints dealt with promptly and fairly, be treated with respect, and have their voices heard by their landlord.
Making headway across a broad range of customer-focused deliverables will be challenging for landlords without significantly increasing spending on in-house contact teams. Effectively streamlining operations will allow specialist talents to be appropriately focused, offering better outcomes for residents.
Social landlords have become adept at supporting residents with complex issues, such as providing financial support or addressing anti-social behaviour. Through understanding their customers and local challenges, customer contact teams work seamlessly internally and with partner agencies to deliver positive outcomes.
Increasingly, landlords are seeking ways to prioritise more complex inbound calls so they are handled by a skilled member of staff, while creating new channels to connect residents with useful information.
A key part of First Choice Homes Oldham’s (FCHO) strategy has been to encourage more customers to interact with their landlord digitally, and data has played a key role in making the case for digital transformation.
Neil Pollitt, director of ICT and Business Intelligence, explains: “We analysed two years’ worth of inbound call data, to better understand who was calling and why. That insight has given us a real platform to make informed decisions.
“We found that the vast majority of inbound calls, something like 75%, were about the same routine issues, which only required straightforward responses. We also learned that a number of calls were unrelated to FCHO – such as queries about bin collections.
“We quickly realised that it’s not an effective use of our contact centre team’s time to be signposting basic information that is already on our website.”
Reflecting recommendations set out in the government’s white paper, FCHO has adopted an approach more akin to the private sector, streamlining its customer contact and ensuring human resources can be directed where they are needed most.
Customer contact evolution
Automated customer messaging technology has evolved markedly since the first ‘chatbots’ were developed to offer limited responses to a selection of fixed questions. 2016 saw the first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) in the design of chatbots, enabling more intuitive automated conversations with users.
Futr’s next generation AI chatbots have been specifically tailored to support housing associations in providing automated responses to a broad range of common resident enquiries. As well as immediate recognition and signposting of information, the technology can also seamlessly connect customers with relevant external partners, or handover more complex cases to human advisors where necessary.
Chatbot technology enables landlords to provide a more consistent and reliable service to customers, without expanding the size or office hours of dedicated contact teams. By adopting automated customer messaging, Futr’s landlord clients are currently resolving between 80% and 90% – or even more – customer interactions without the need for human intervention.
The system learns through usage and draws upon an ever-expanding database of historic customer enquiries, signposting residents to the right information or support. Using AI, the chatbot interprets and responds automatically to customer enquiries across a range of digital platforms.
Inclusive, accessible support
For many landlords, the accessibility and flexibility of online customer support is as important as the quality and efficiency of the service provided. To achieve the truly ‘transformational change’ in customer experience outlined in the Social Housing White Paper, it’s vital that everyone feels included in digital progress.
In September 2020, believe housing became the first social landlord to embed Futr’s automated customer messaging system into its online channels, to help alleviate pressure on its traditional contact teams.
Carol Crathorne, Service Transformation manager at believe housing, explains: “Our strategy centres on first-point-of-contact resolution, and we receive over 2,000 calls to our contact centre every day.
“Our contact centre is only available during office hours, but our customers want answers any time of the day or night. In the past, we also had to use external translation services to cater for non-English-speaking customers – whether that be written or spoken interactions.
“It’s not only costly, but also time consuming and not a great customer service.”
Futr’s chatbot now provides round-the-clock support to believe residents, supplementing traditional contact-centre hours.
Through significant investment into our own proprietary natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU), the platform accommodates individual conversational approaches. This means that, no matter how a resident words their question, the chatbot will be able to understand the meaning and resolve or escalate each unique issue as appropriate.
By running conversations through a combination of underlying translation services and individual translation dictionaries, and then using our own ‘confidence scoring’ mechanism, the system is able to interpret and converse in more than 120 languages, including Welsh, offering a far more inclusive service to residents than ever before.
To further ensure that residents can manage their tenancy on their own terms, Futr’s chatbot is truly ‘omni-channel’, operating across all of a landlord’s preferred platforms; including websites, customer portals, and within apps residents use every day such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
Scalable solutions
Speaking to landlords of all sizes over the past few months, it’s clear that some feel far more prepared than others for a new era of customer regulation.
For larger organisations able to invest in diverse customer service channels over time, the new tenant satisfaction measures set out in November’s white paper may seem eminently achievable.
Ongo, one of the sector’s Top 30 digital housing providers, is advancing its digital transformation at pace and aims to conduct 75% of its customer interactions online by 2023.
“Smaller housing associations in the early stages of their digital journeys will need to adapt rapidly to new ways of working or risk losing ground to their peers on tenant satisfaction”
In Ongo’s case, automated customer messaging is supporting residents through the channel shift and providing useful data to inform the next steps in the landlord’s digital journey.
Ryan Heseltine, Solutions architect at Ongo, explains: “We experience over 10,000 calls into the contact centre each month – our ambition is to maximise what customers can digitally self-serve, with process automation in the background.
“Futr’s insights into the questions our customers are asking enables us to improve customer experience going forward.”
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Smaller housing associations in the early stages of their digital journeys will need to adapt rapidly to new ways of working or risk losing ground to their peers on tenant satisfaction – a new measure proposed in the charter for social housing residents.
For this group, supportive chatbot technology offer some ‘quick wins’ at an affordable price – commensurate with the number of homes they manage.
Residents benefit from an accessible new communications channel, while the landlords’ resources are freed up to concentrate on successfully resolving the most challenging, time-consuming issues.
Only by responding nimbly to the changing needs of residents and embracing technology will the sector achieve the latest lofty targets set out by central government.
Main image: Kitty Hadaway, Housing lead, Futr
Read next: How Halton Housing claimed the #HDTop30 title
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