Town & Country Housing Group has gone live with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, designed and deployed by CRM specialists Optevia, after a six-month implementation.
Based on Optevia’s Social Housing Essentials, the new system enables users to handle their workloads better through automatic prioritisation, to better align services with tenant requirements, manage the capacity of individual employees, and to answer tenant queries at the first point of contact.
The housing provider now has 85 members of staff using the Optevia and Dynamics CRM system, including call-centre staff and housing and income managers. The system includes a series of built-in FAQs so that when tenants call, their queries can often be dealt with at the first point of contact. All queries are recorded in Dynamics CRM and reports can be produced to highlight the most popular queries.
Before the introduction of the new system, call-centre staff would have to email tenant requests to the income and housing managers; the response times to these requests were often dependent on the order in which emails were read. Since then, Town & Country has identified which service requests require prioritisation so that income and housing managers can deal with the most pressing tasks first.
Jamie Barker, project manager, Town & Country Housing Group, said, “The system has now been live for only a few weeks but we have seen significant benefits already. It was our aim from the outset to increase our call centre’s ‘first-time fix’ rate to 80 per cent and I am confident we will achieve that.
“Income and housing managers are already commenting on the significant decrease in the number of emails they receive and their improved ability to deal with tenant queries within service level agreements. The system is enabling us to ensure that the most urgent cases, such as offensive graffiti or domestic abuse, can be dealt with far more quickly and efficiently than before.”
Town & Country’s managers can now instantly see the progress of queries and which tasks are approaching the SLA limit and take appropriate action. The system also provides more transparency on individual workloads and can help allocate work based on individuals’ capacities.
Fran Merrin, a customer services adviser working in Town & Country’s customer service centre and involved in testing the Dynamics CRM design before it went live, said, “The main difference between Dynamics CRM and the old system is that I now have everything in one place and I don’t have to constantly switch screens to deal with a tenant’s query.
“It is far easier to select the right case type, whether its anti-social behaviour or special service requests, and the system routes requests automatically to the right income officer or housing manager, and the FAQs also make it very easy to answer queries on the phone.”
The second phase of Town & Country’s project is now underway, covering service charge enquiry handling, email and deeper integration with the main housing management system.
