Having launched a new customer contact centre with Northgate in 2009, Family Mosaic has reported that it has since halved the number of voids, reduced rent arrears by more than 30 per cent and received a 82 per cent approval rating from tenants for its contact centre operations.
Family Mosaic has been a long-term Northgate customer, from 1999 when it installed an integrated housing management system from First Software (now Northgate). In response to considerable corporate growth, Family Mosaic implemented CRM using Northgate Front Office in 2008 and finally the new contact centre last year.
London-based Family Mosaic employs 1,400 staff, and provides housing for over 45,000 people in London and Essex. It spent £45m in 2009 on new housing stock and is now planning for further growth.
Ken Youngman, group director of finance, Family Mosaic, said, “Value for money IT and key strategic partnerships are the main factors underpinning our strategy. We believe that we have the best IT infrastructure in the sector, and there’s no doubt that our partnership with Northgate has given us world-class solutions for housing management, CRM, workflow management and mobile working.”
Recognised as one of the top 50 call centres in the UK, Family Mosaic’s customer contact centre is based around the Northgate Front Office system and a mobile-working system from Kirona. Front Office supports over 50 workflows delivering caseloads to Family Mosaic’s housing officers who are now truly mobile. John Tilsley, head of business systems, Family Mosaic, said, “Using Agile development techniques, Front Office has enabled rapid mobilisation and delivered real business benefit.”
The contact centre receives over 700 calls per day and resolves most queries in one call, getting it ‘right first time’. This was achieved through the integration of Front Office with Northgate Housing which gives contact centre staff a single view of the customer, a full audit trail of previous contacts and a clear system-driven workflow for problem recording and resolution. A recent customer survey found that 82 per cent of queries were correctly resolved first time with no need for further calls.
Family Mosaic recently won the ‘Customer Service Training Team of the Year 2010’ award at the Customer Service Training Awards. This was based around the housing provider’s deployment of Front Office to its complaints team. The system now provides an end-to-end process across the entire organisation for successfully dealing with tenants’ complaints.
In the areas of voids and arrears, Northgate’s Task Manager is being used to optimise resources by monitoring workloads and intelligently distributing work to the right people. Since the implementation of Task Manager, voids have been reduced by 50 per cent and rents arrears cut by 31 per cent.
Over the last two years, Family Mosaic has consolidated its technology supplier base and rates the management of these relationships to be vital in improving service delivery.
Saul Stevens, IT director, Family Mosaic, explained, “All suppliers can give a good service these days; otherwise they would no longer be in business. But finding a technology provider like Northgate who really understands our business and has the vision to work with us to support and develop a long-term plan is not so easy.
“Working strategically with Northgate has ensured that Family Mosaic has a clear, appropriate, and scalable applications roadmap that is providing a return on investment and always adding real business value.”
