As housing associations are under pressure to do more with less while improving tenant engagement, more are turning to analytics to identify development opportunities. In this article, Sue Michaelwaite, Housing Expert at 8×8, outlines seven essential contact centre analytics that can help
Housing association finances are stretched. Spend on existing stock is up 55% on pre-pandemic levels. Couple this with growing pressure to provide long-term quality service, and housing associations are facing a perfect storm.
Improving finances and tenant services calls for insight from powerful analytics drawing on multiple data sources. This provides a stable footing on which to base planning and implementation of improvements. Cost efficiencies and better tenant engagement naturally follow.
As the backbone of housing association communications, the contact centre is central to improving tenant engagement. It can reveal operational efficiencies that can be nurtured into substantive, strategic or organisational change. Integrating AI and analytics at all levels of the contact centre empowers leaders to make the improvements they need.
Seven essential analytics for housing contact centres
1. Speech and sentiment analytics improve tenant satisfaction
You’ll be familiar with; ‘it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.’ We communicate rich information through the words and the tone we use. Speech and sentiment analytics help us make use of this valuable information.
Conversational AI-based contact centre technology like the 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA), for example, can be programmed to create alerts to specific words or phrases. These can assist call-routing and increase first-call resolution rates by ensuring enquiries reach the right person in the first instance.
Integrating this call data with the housing associations’ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can highlight vulnerable tenants who may need specialist support.
Efficiency, speed and sensitivity combine to deliver a more personalised and compassionate service while reducing the time and cost needed to service a call.
2. Customer experience analytics for upskilling opportunities
Broader customer experience analytics enable contact centre leaders to identify common themes and discover opportunities to improve engagement. The same tools can be used beyond the contact centre to gain a deeper understanding of tenant needs from across the organisation, with a communications platform that supports unified communications and contact centre experiences,
Metrics like call time, abandonment rates, first-resolution rates, and sentiment analysis, identify issues that could benefit from organisation-wide upskilling and make the whole organisation more effective.
3. Workforce management analytics optimise agent schedules
Staff levels that reflect fluctuations in tenant queries can be hard to predict. Too few staff leads to poor tenant experiences and agent burnout, while too many is a waste of resources.
Workforce management analytics give contact centre leaders insight into data, the number and type of agents they have, their schedules and work hours for better resource planning. This helps optimise agent schedules for time, number, and tenant needs.
4. Supervisor dashboards and analytics for training and strategising
Analytics allow team leaders to track the performance of their teams and individual agents against key metrics. Presented visually on dashboards, these analytics provide leaders with a clear view of contact centre performance and of Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) from completed surveys, for example.
From these views and metrics, team leaders can devise strategies to address any metrics that aren’t being met. For example, providing team training or coaching on specific issues. Performance analytics are useful for driving behaviour and training new agents, giving leaders the ability to effectively monitor agents’ development and implement the right training and support at the right time.
5. Customer journey analytics overcome common hurdles
From the first touchpoint to the final resolution, customer journey analytics visualise and map tenants’ journeys, identifying hurdles that create a negative tenant experience. For example, analysing abandonment rates highlights where and why tenants drop calls and helps identify ways to prevent this.
Incorrect call-routing causes frustration and means agents spend time transferring calls between departments. Analysis of customer journeys means the housing association can create automated processes to route calls more effectively and use agent time more effectively.
The transition between self-service and agent-led channels can be a point of friction when tenants have to repeat information. Visually mapped customer journeys with analytics help to identify pain points and develop solutions to this common problem.
6. Tenant voice analytics complete the picture
Feedback forms, SMS surveys, and post-call surveys provide valuable TSM data. Incorporating information from multiple channels, gives contact centre leaders a rich picture of tenants’ feelings toward the housing association and its service.
Analytics provide contact centre leaders with valuable headline data and in-depth analytics to help address areas of concern and meet service level agreements.
7. Predictive and proactive analytics prevent issues before they arise
Data from the housing association’s contact centre provide a wide range of customer interaction metrics like call volume, average call duration, agent performance and trend analysis of common issues. Predictive analysis can be used to identify potential tenant behaviours, like payment concerns, allowing for proactive outreach and support.
Analysing historical data provides insight into future patterns to identify emerging concerns before they become major issues and to support strategic planning.
Predictive analytics can be combined with other transformative technologies, such as video calling, to better assess and address maintenance issues that cost housing associations billions per year.
Opening the door to improved services
As time and financial pressures increase, housing association leaders can scarcely afford to develop bespoke analytics solutions. Even if they could, agents and supervisors are simply too busy to learn how to analyse complex datasets, when they have tenants’ requirements to meet.
Housing associations can benefit from a contact centre solution that combines end-to-end analytics to empower agents with AI to streamline contact centre operations and satisfy tenants.
8×8 contact centre is an intuitively built, design-first application that meets the needs of everyone in the contact centre – and beyond. Its effective workflow interfaces bring all the tools and analytics needed into a simple, powerful dashboard. At-a-glance analytics allow agents, supervisors, and leaders alike to grasp the insights and use them for data-driven actions quickly.
By packaging powerful analytics in a simple, intuitive interface, tenant engagement and operational efficiency increases are available to all housing centres, not just those with dedicated IT systems development teams. Visit 8×8 for Housing Associations to learn more.
Image credit: Ton Wanniwat/Shutterstock
Read next: Trends and predictions for communications in housing: What’s in store for 2025?
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