As part of its implementation of Orchard’s browser-based housing management system, Coast and Country Housing has also deployed the company’s Customer Dashboard for ‘broad and shallow’ CRM and workflow.
The new tool replaces Coast and Country’s previous paper- and Excel-based processes for recording customer contacts, both of which required substantial manual inputs, were hard to analyse and couldn’t be reconciled with the customers’ personal data already stored in the housing management system. Coast and Country therefore wanted a tool that could capture contact metrics as they happened and would allow other contextual workflows or tasks to be triggered automatically.
Coast and Country originally planned to develop the software itself but when Orchard’s launch of the Customer Dashboard coincided with the housing provider’s implementation of Orchard Housing, it decided that it would be more cost-effective to use the Customer Dashboard, alongside the benefits of immediate integration with Orchard Housing and ongoing technical support.
The implementation of the Customer Dashboard was completed in one day, with limited customisation done by Coast & Country’s IT team to fine tune the security settings to enable only the required functionality.
Since the workflow functionality went live in July 2012, customer contact metrics are now captured as they happen with no extra effort involved, duplication of data has been removed, visibility of customer contacts is now company wide, and customer service has improved, particularly when the contact centre ‘hands off’ a call to the back office with appropriate screens automatically picking up context-sensitive data thus avoiding repeat questions to the customer.
