Moat Homes has reduced its tenants’ rent arrears by £800,000 within a year of deploying Mobysoft’s RentSense software as a replacement for a dated CRM system in advance of the full introduction of universal credit.
Moat’s income team was originally using its CRM system to manage their arrears workload. However, the combination of the introduction of universal credit at many of the local authorities where Moat was operating and inaccurate or duplicated data from the CRM system led Moat to implement Mobysoft’s RentSense software.
Kristian Melgaard, director of customer contact, Moat, said, “We ran forecasts on the likely impact of full-service universal credit and estimated that it could result in 3,000 new arrears cases for the income team to manage. We also modelled universal credit’s potential impact on our cashflow and bad debt.
“We would therefore need to free up capacity within our income team. We couldn’t provide extra resources indefinitely so we had to target our efforts where they would be most effective.”
Lorraine Grindley, head of customer accounts, Moat, said, “The most frustrating thing for the income team was that there was no framework or structure. Once they started using RentSense, they could go into the system and see their workload for the day.
“The income officers absolutely love RentSense because it has transformed their work. They are now completing all of their caseloads every week.”
RentSense was implemented at Moat in June 2017 with the aim of reducing arrears by £600,000 within 12 months. Melgaard said, “We passed our original initial target within nine months of having RentSense and within a year our arrears had decreased by at least £800,000.”
RentSense’s use has also gone beyond the pure reduction of arrears and has helped Moat’s teams operate across traditional silos of activity and different housing accounts. Grindley said, “We’re set up to be flexible and adaptable and RentSense helps with that because officers can work on each other’s patches.”
As the introduction of full-service UC gets closer, Moat has now begun testing RentSense’s Daily Processing module which captures all payments made each day, immediately removing them from the weekly workload and removing duplicated cases.
