ForHousing has completed the implementation of a ‘single pane of glass’ business intelligence and reporting system from Enghouse Interactive and Amillan. The combined system integrates the housing provider’s core business applications and supports a range of digital channels.
Angela Worthington, group assistant director of customer experience, ForViva (ForHousing’s parent company), said, “As well as our ‘single pane of glass’ system, we also wanted to support skills-based call routing and the ability to take PCI-compliant card payments.”
Working with its technology partner Amillan, ForHousing chose Enghouse Interactive’s Communications Center (CC) system to provide the necessary multi-channel capabilities. The housing provider also implemented Enghouse’s Quality Management Suite (QMS) to cover call recording and scorecard functionality for monitoring agents’ performance, and the Teleopti workforce management tool.
The initial implementation in ForHousing’s customer service centre had around 40 users. With CC in place, Amillan has since helped the housing provider to add a further 100 users and extend the use of multimedia. By standardising on CC, ForHousing was also able to use other applications such as its web-based Wallboard to give agents full visibility of real-time performance data.
With ForHousing’s previous contact centre solution, it had been difficult to onboard new users or support people working from home. With CC, the contact centre team could be mobilised with no disruption to service. The solution also offered greater flexibility during lockdown; some agents had to home school making it difficult for them to take calls, but by using CC, ForHousing let them focus on email-based activities instead.
Screen- and call-recording along with scorecard functionality enables ForHousing’s team leaders to assess all agents in a fair and consistent fashion, helping to increase morale, reduce staff turnover, and improve the customer experience.
ForHousing wanted to automate more of the contact centre’s services and extend its hours to offer a 24/7 service. Working with Amillan, it chose Converse360 to provide a service automation platform with web bots, speech bots and virtual assistants, all seamlessly integrated with CC.
Virtual assistants are now handling 60 per cent of the online chats from ForHousing’s website. The average handling time for live chat has decreased by around 90 seconds per session as a result. Reporting and management has also been transformed. ForHousing now has full ‘cradle to grave’ reporting across all types of customer interactions.
Worthington said, “It’s no longer just about tenants phoning up to pay their rent or report a repair. Calls are becoming much longer. Our average handling time has increased by around 20 per cent because tenants have more complex needs, but thanks to the virtual assistants and the Enghouse Interactive’s Communications Center, our agents can spend more time with them and add greater value to each interaction.”
