RHP’S ‘Sundown’ team manager, Emily Ward, reports on how overseeing the development of a bespoke CRM system has benefited the housing provider’s aim to resolve the majority of customer cases by the end of each day.
When the Sundown team was assembled in April 2015, we aimed to transform our speed of service while retaining the quality we knew our customers already loved. We knew that to achieve this, we had to have a CRM system that was able to meet our unique demands. We also needed visibility so that we could review our performance in real-time instead of waiting for a report at the end of the week. Being able to see live results has empowered the team to drive their own performance and continually do better.
We can now see the headline picture, drill down easily into the detail, and use the in-the-moment information to shift resources when and where we need to.
RHP launched its new CRM system last year, with the aim of capturing information from across all the services customers receive from us. It offers us a single view of the customer so we can see everything in one place.
A year later, we used it to inform a brave step-change in our services. We analysed what customers were asking and how quickly and well we were handling their queries. We found that, on average, it took 35 days to respond to certain types of issues, such as a decision made about a repair that hadn’t been fixed first time.
To get a true reflection of where we were, we cleansed the data in the first week and resolved over 400 historic issues. We then moved forward with a clean slate and some consistent ideas about how we should manage the system in future.
There were new functions we wanted from our CRM system which our ICT team refined. We wanted the performance dashboards to be accessible to all of the team, not just the managers who, historically, had been the only people able to view them. We also wanted to be able to click-through on specific tabs within the dashboards so that all of us could drill down and be able to produce performance reports.
One of RHP’s system developers, Yogesh Patel, said that he was initially cautious when this new approach was presented. He said, “It was a challenge for our team as it meant we had to change several workflows within the CRM system. However, because we use Microsoft Dynamics, the CRM system was able to be updated and refined quickly.
“It’s fantastic to see how well the new CRM system is performing for the Sundown team and rising to their needs. They’re able to see every customer query that comes in through every available channel and can then prioritise the query until they eventually close the case. It’s been a brilliant project to work on.”
As a direct effect of our CRM, we’ve been able to take our service to new levels, especially around our speed of response. In March 2015, we were resolving 33 per cent of queries within the same day. With the CRM system and a commitment from staff across RHP to use it, we’ve transformed our speed and resolved 87 per cent on the same day, every day of every week over the last six months. We’re proud to say this is a sector-leading result and in September 2015, we won a UK Customer Experience Award recognising our success. It’s down to the combination of intelligent systems, harnessed by amazing people!
We’re not stopping there. The system has even more scope for improving the customer experience. We’d like to have a ‘word cloud’ function so that we can pick up on trends and identify patterns of issues we can get ahead of. The Sundown team is now beginning to manage this process, capturing customer information and reporting it with greater levels of detail. The sun hasn’t set yet!
Emily Ward is the Sundown team manager at RHP.
