Housing Association Turns To Microsoft For CRM Solution

A South of England based housing association has selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM to better help staff handle their workload.

Town and Country Housing Group (TCHG), which owns properties in Kent, Sussex, Surrey and South London, is working with public sector and housing CRM specialists Optevia to deploy the solution.

The solution is based on Optevia Social Housing Essentials (OSHE) and aims to enable users to better handle workload through automatic prioritisation, to better align services with customer requirements, manage individual employee capacity and empower the Customer Service Centre (CSC) to answer customer queries at the first point of contact.

“The system has been live for only a few weeks and we have seen significant benefit already. It was our aim from the outset to increase CSC’s resolution rate to 80% and I am confident we will achieve that,” claimed TCHG project manager Jamie Barker.

“Already income managers and housing managers are commenting on the significant decrease in their volume of email and in their ability to deal with customer queries within service level agreements.

“The system is enabling us to ensure that the most urgent cases – offensive graffiti, domestic abuse etc. – can be dealt with far more quickly and efficiently,” Barker added.

The new solution is currently in use by over 85 staff including CSC, housing and income managers.

It has given CSC staff access to a series of built in FAQs which allows them to deal with queries at the first point of contact.

All queries are then recorded in Dynamics CRM, which can be then produce reports highlighting the most popular query so TCHG can better align the service offering with customer need.

The new system gives managers an instant view of the progress of queries and which tasks are approaching the SLA limit so they can take appropriate action.

It also provides more transparency on individual workload so work can be allocated based on individual capacity.

Staff Impressed With New Solution

“The main difference between CRM and the old system is that now I have everything in one place and I don’t have to constantly switch screens to deal with a customer’s query,” claimed Fran Merrin, a customer services advisor based in the CSC.

“It is far easier to select the right case type – be it anti-social behaviour or special service requests – and the system routes requests automatically to the right income officer of housing manager.

“The FAQs also make it very easy to answer queries on the phone. I am on the frontline and being empowered to deal with customer queries quickly and efficiently helps me do my job and ensures our customers are happy with the service they receive,” Merrin added.

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