A North East housing association has commissioned a bespoke AI-powered speech analytics platform in an attempt to improve communication with tenants and support its compliance with regulations.
Thirteen Group is working with technology solutions firm, Avoira to develop the platform, which the housing provider says will “further strengthen” its commitment to listening to its tenants.
As well as automatically ‘quality scoring’ calls, the platform will promote adherence to – and provide evidence of compliance with – the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023.
According to Thirteen, the solution will capture, analyse, transcribe and score over 330,000 calls handled annually by the housing association, which owns and manages more than 36,000 homes.
Avoira’s solution will be built around the Xdroid customer experience (CX) application, which the company’s CX engineers will train to meet Thirteen’s specific needs.
This will see them creating a suite of tags – keywords and phrases – which will be picked up by Xdroid and used to categorise, flag and score calls.
By incorporating this within a risk matrix, it is said the platform will enable Thirteen to identify a wide range of customer needs, such as physical and mental health concerns, financial issues and urgent property remediation requests.
Adele Mclaren, Thirteen’s head of touchpoints and experience, said: Implementation of Xdroid will mark a step change in the way we monitor, score and finesse customer service delivery.
“Ensuring we provide safe and quality homes for our customers is at the forefront of what we do. That means listening to what our current and future customers need.
“Our strategy is focussed on customer excellence and this is what drives our ambitions around how we ensure that the best possible services are delivered to our customers.
“Automating our quality assurance processes will remove the obvious limitations of random call sampling. With every call being assessed we’ll for the first time have a full 360-degree view of Touchpoint service centre operations and standards.
“Crucially, with the roll out of a new regulatory framework under Awaab’s Law, we’ll not only be better able to identify and respond to urgently required property remediations, but evidence our compliance with the new regulations.”
Once implemented, the system is expected to report the volume of customers with additional needs, and confirm for every call whether agents secured the correct outcome.
It will also incorporate a risk scoring capability to ensure the residents with additional needs are identified and their issue is appropriately and promptly addressed.
Call handling
Currently, Thirteen is dependent on manually evaluating the quality of calls, handled at its Touchpoint Service Centre in Middlesbrough, and its Touchpoint stores in Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hull and Hartlepool, alongside its ‘mobile touchpoint’, launched last summer.
The project will initially see Avoira’s CX team build on the speech recognition and transcription engine, curating it to Thirteen’s customer interactions. It will also draw upon the tech company’s wider experience in both public and private sector contact centre markets.
It’s claimed the solution will provide Thirteen with a variety of metrics to support compliance and inform best practice in service delivery, with management insights provided through analysis of every call.
From October Awaab’s Law will require social landlords to resolve damp and mould issues within specific timescales.
Matthew Iball, CX consultant said that both regulatory and cost pressures are seeing social housing providers look to implement sophisticated analytics solutions.
“Housing associations and community interest companies are facing multiple challenges,” he added. “As a result they are looking at how they can use AI and, in particular, sophisticated analytics, to give insight into productivity, service standards and vulnerable customer care.
“The depth and breadth of management insights yielded by an organisation-specific deployment of Xdroid facilitates enhancement of both productivity and service quality.”
Main image: Adele Mclaren, head of touchpoints and experience, Thirteen Group
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