Call and response
How Riverside is using smart technology to fulfil residents’ desire for more proactive engagement
Sometimes, for a housing association to improve its customers’ experiences, it first needs to bring a different mentality of its own to the problem. That, certainly, has been a lesson Riverside’s Graham Weaver has learned.
As head of digital products at Riverside, one of the UK’s largest social landlords, Weaver wanted to implement improved technology options across the organisation to help facilitate better and more consistent customer service and increase customer satisfaction.
This change would also help to manage an end-to-end complaints process so that it meets customer needs and follows industry regulations that can be monitored to successful completion and satisfaction for everyone involved.
New technology and improved processes
Weaver acknowledges that repairs are “one of the key elements” of the service that a landlord provides, and is something Riverside is also working to improve. Getting it wrong can mean tenants being visited multiple times over a single issue without that issue being resolved, or it can mean unscheduled or inconvenient visits.
“In theory, [these] should be easy to solve,” he continues. “But a lot of the root cause is because we’ve had a lot of legacy platforms and, from a customer experience point of view, no consistent thread.”
The solution, Weaver explains, is a marriage of new technology and improved business processes. “We’re trying to look at the end-to-end repairs journey,” he says. “First-time fix is always a challenge, but we’re trying to be more proactive with customers. So, traditionally, they would have had to ring us to either book a repair themselves or see the status of a repair. Now, we’ve got those services online for customers so they can self-serve; they can log on and look at the status of a repair and log queries with us.”
Weaver describes this as being “more on the front foot with customer service”, but this new approach is only possible because it is enabled by new technology.
Graham Weaver
Head of Digital Products, Riverside
“[Salesforce's CRM platform gives] a single view of the customer, so that not only our customers but also our colleagues have all the information we think is relevant in one place, whereas before we would have been swivel chairing to multiple systems to find out information about the customer.”
Joined-up platform
Riverside has brought in Salesforce as its customer relationship management (CRM) platform in an attempt to give it “a single view of the customer, so that not only our customers but also our colleagues have all the information we think is relevant in one place, whereas before we would have been swivel chairing to multiple systems to find out information about the customer.”
This joined-up platform allows Riverside to use “guided call flows”: a semi-automated system that guides its human advisors in order for a call to be better handled.
Weaver explains: “We can see that they've actually called in this many times already in the last three months or there’s an open case already ongoing about a query that they bring in. That helps us give better customer service in that instance because we can be on the front foot with the right information.”
Proactive contact
There are other areas where the fusion of a more proactive attitude and smart technology is transforming how Riverside engages with its customers. For example, its attempt to tackle damp and mould in its homes has seen it install around 3,500 Switchee devices, which monitor temperature and humidity.
Again, says Weaver, this is about getting ahead of the game when it comes to engaging with tenants. “We can start trying to proactively identify homes that could be showing signs of damp and mould,” he says, adding that the same technology can also be used to spot customers who are experiencing difficulty with fuel bills: “Particularly in the winter months where people were struggling to pay bills, we could start seeing where the heating hadn’t been on for long periods of time and people could be vulnerable and at risk. We can use that information to proactively contact customers to make sure they’re ok.”
And it is through these kinds of technologies that landlords such as Riverside are also learning how wider business benefits can be derived directly from an improvement in customer engagement. For example, the organisation is looking into using Internet of Things (IoT) technology to monitor boiler performance.
“We could automatically monitor boilers so that we could see if they were performing properly and recognise potential faults before they happen,” Weaver elaborates. “As it stands today, a customer would call us if their boiler broke and then we'd have to be reactive and arrange a gas engineer to visit. We’re not doing that yet but one of our aspirations is to push out IoT and start monitoring equipment in homes.”
This clearly would have a broader application as it would improve energy efficiency and could be used to move Riverside’s stock closer towards net zero quicker and more cheaply.
“We could start seeing where the heating hadn’t been on for long periods of time and people could be vulnerable and at risk.”
Culture change
So, is it only the availability of new technology that is driving this push for improved services, or is there also a culture change going on in the sector? According to Weaver, it’s a bit of both.
“Actually, our customers are demanding us to be more proactive,” he says. “They have been accustomed for many years to other services being more proactive. Amazon, John Lewis etc are always held up as the examples from other sectors but customers are used to it these days.
“Our customers are quite rightly demanding that we start being a lot more proactive and offer better services in line with those general expectations.”
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