Thirteen Group won the silver award in the innovation category of the inaugural Housing Technology 2024 awards. Kay Glew, Thirteen Group’s director of operations, explains the housing provider’s award-winning arrears management programme.
Innovation is the future delivered; it lets us keep moving forward with purpose, to test boundaries and to find new ways to address old and enduring problems, improving outcomes for customers. In short, innovation is vital.
But why? Because the housing sector has faced unprecedented challenges in recent years. Every facet of the sector has been stress-tested as we continue to grapple with high labour costs, budget and resource constraints, and the prolonged impact of the cost-of-living crisis.
Debt & arrears
In tandem, debt levels have also risen. This has made the task of engaging with some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in society all the more important, particularly when you consider that as a sector, we’ve been historically slow to adopt technology and innovative ways of working, which has led to low levels of customer engagement and poor customer experience.
As an organisation, Thirteen Group owns and manages 35,000 homes, providing housing and supported services across the North East, Yorkshire and the North of England. Given the size of our portfolio, we can’t afford to be reactive and run the risk of disengaging or disadvantaging our customers. We have to be proactive in our approach, particularly when it comes to debt recovery.
Better resource allocation
In the last three years, there has been a growing need to free up more housing services coordinators’ time to better manage the process of debt recovery, particularly when set against an uncertain economic backdrop.
To put this into context, we had an annual debt of approximately £157 million to collect in 2022. With debt recovery becoming an increasing challenge, we wanted to implement a system that accurately predicted customer behaviours, allowing our team of 120 housing services coordinators to prioritise and focus resources more efficiently. We wanted a solution that replaced our widely-used legacy product that suffered from the creation of high-volumes or recommended manual interventions. Instead, we wanted to focus our team’s effort on customers who really needed their help.
Caseload Manager
To achieve this, we needed to embrace innovation; we needed to take a proactive approach and work collaboratively to address the challenges we faced. Step forward Voicescape’s Caseload Manager.
Caseload Manager assesses a range of long- and short-term risk factors to make intelligent predictions about individual cases for housing providers, developed in partnership between Voicescape and Thirteen Group.
Data science & behavioural insights
Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Voicescape’s data science and behavioural insight expertise, it automatically prompts interventions, enabling us to deliver the optimum outcome for both the organisation and our residents.
Caseload Manager is designed to rapidly reduce active and new caseload generation, deciding whether no action, automated engagement or manual intervention is needed. By delivering the optimal intervention (channel, message & timing), Caseload Manager enables us to prioritise and focus our resources. While seamlessly integrating with our existing collections technology, it ‘feeds’ officers with cases in a controlled way so they can maximise their resources, spending more time with customers who benefit from skilled manual interventions, such as supporting with benefit advice, or where appropriate making enforcement interventions.
By minimising the case list and automating engagement wherever it’s optimal, Caseload Manager vastly reduces the number of manual tasks that coordinators need to do. This guarantees they’re spending their time to the best effect.
Measurable benefits
We’ve embraced the very essence of innovation, with the aim of achieving a dramatic step-change in the arrears performance of the organisation and generating additional time to spend with customers. Through the development and implementation of Caseload Manager, we’ve transformed our approach to arrears management by improving our colleagues’ decision-making capabilities and understanding of individual customers’ needs.
Since implementation, Caseload Manager has been instrumental in:
- The recovery of £800,000 of arrears in the first few weeks of its use and maintaining an improved arrears position of around £250,000 per week;
- Taking 2,000 people out of debt;
- Reducing evictions by 40 per cent;
- Cutting the amount transferred to former customer debt by 12 per cent;
- Reducing the number of arrears cases requiring manual interventions by 65 per cent (the equivalent to 26 cases per housing coordinator and 6.5 FTE per week);
- Enabling us to recover our arrears position faster following seasonal peaks (e.g. Christmas);
- Increasing employee satisfaction (86 per cent of users said automation has made their day-to-day work easier);
- Freeing up two hours per week for each of our 120 housing services coordinators.
All of our arrears communications are now based on ‘nudge’ theory, so our automated messages are tailored to deliver a different result, and a different tone of voice in some situations, at a different escalation point to try and trigger different engagement responses. We’re now considering how to take those ‘nudge’ principles and apply them to all of Thirteen Group’s services.
Without Caseload Manager, we wouldn’t have achieved the results we have this year. Caseload Manager has challenged our preconceptions around customers and how we manage interventions. It has also provided valuable insights, allowing Thirteen Group to refine our support for individual customers.
Kay Glew is the director of operations at Thirteen Group. The housing provider won the silver award in the innovation category of the inaugural Housing Technology 2024 awards.
