Halton Housing

Customer overview

With over 7,000 homes across Cheshire and the North West our client, Halton Housing, is an innovative, award-winning housing provider.

As a not for profit social housing organisation their mission focusses upon improving people’s lives by supporting individuals and families in finding homes they can afford and be proud of.

Understanding their customers’ needs and the local community is of central importance to the organisation, and it’s this knowledge that underpins all strategic decisions the association makes.

Their innovative, forward-thinking focus means technology is a critical component to delivering their business mission. Being located within the UK’s North West tech hub has enabled our customer to build strong relationships with the region’s leading technology community and technology partners.

Customer challenge

A central component to ongoing communication between the association and their tenants.

As a key communication platform between the housing association and its 7,000 tenants, the contact centre is utilised for reporting issues, requesting repairs and as a central point of contact and escalation. Any changes therefore had to be considerate to both the internal and external needs of colleagues and tenants.

The association identified that in order to maintain both its customer centricity and technological innovation mission, they needed to expand the capabilities of their contact centre to ensure their communications approach was keeping pace with changing customer behaviours and expectations.

Like many businesses looking to update their communications methods they discovered that by moving to the Cloud they could consolidate all of their customer-facing functions and support systems into one easy-to-use interface, bringing benefits for colleagues and customers alike.

Having identified the need to invest in a new platform, our customer began the search for a provider who could help with their migration to a cloud-based Contact Centre solution for Teams. This platform supported a cloud-first strategy and would enable a more seamless customer experience whilst ensuring colleagues were better connected through one environment via the implementation of Microsoft Teams.

Customer goal

Bringing customer conversations and team collaboration into one familiar, easy-to-use collaboration hub.

The objective was to move to a cloud-first strategy, whilst maintaining a customer centric approach.

A business-wide migration to Microsoft Teams, including a new Microsoft Contact Centre, would enable all colleagues to be better connected across
one collaborative platform, as well as providing improved reporting and analytical tools that would help the management team.

Our solution

Modern contact centres offer a holistic approach to customer support.

Working in collaboration with our strategic partner, Geomant, M247 responded to a tender request that would provide a comprehensive Microsoft Teams, Contact Centre and Unified Communication (UC) solution. We were awarded the contract based on our response, which incorporated an end-to-end solution that worked within the Teams environment and required no additional infrastructure needs.

Taking a consultative approach, we undertook demonstrations of the platform and ran workshops to capture the customers full set of requirements, enabling us to propose the best-fit solution. Our omnichannel Contact Centre solution is cloud-based and fully integrated into the Microsoft Teams application. Together with our Direct Routing capabilities and Call Recording, our customers entire team are now able to make, receive and record tenant calls from any device, anywhere, at any time. It also ensures the housing association adheres to compliance requirements regarding the capture of conversations and data.

7,000 tenants now have the flexibility to reach an advisor from wherever they are, using their preferred method of communication knowing all channels and interactions dovetail into one platform. As all interactions are captured, tenants have the reassurance of always dealing with an advisor who is aware of their personal circumstances and where they are in the housing process.

Information can be quickly and easily translated into valuable insight helping the housing association make more informed decisions, whilst also ensuring they retain their mission of being customer centric. Information captured can also be used to support ongoing training activities when new advisors join the team.

Advisors are now able to easily manage calls with a single view of everything across one platform, without the need to navigate away from the familiar, easy-to-use application. This seamless, efficient workflow means advisors can deliver the personalised and timely service they aim for with its customer centric strategy. This has ensured that customer experience and resolving queries remains front and centre.

Results

• Cost efficiencies

As part of the solution, Halton Housing registered for M247’s all-inclusive call plan. This provided a total of 96,000domestic minutes a month, which can be used as required across the workforce (rather than an allocated set amount per user, which can often lead to wastage). Our bundle offer enabled them to make significant cost savings whilst also meaning monthly budgeting was streamlined, without the worry of out of control, unplanned costs.

• Customer experience and time management

The analytical and call routing service also means that their team of supervisors can route and direct conversations to specific advisors/team members based on a host of different criteria including numbers, skills, geography, data and much more, allowing the housing association to manage workloads and experience for both colleagues and customers simultaneously.

• Ability to scale

Our solution offers a flexible OPEX model with no upfront, hidden, or unexpected costs. The solution implementedprovided a system for 80 DR licenses, 9 call centre licenses and 2 supervisor licenses and can easily be scaled upor down, at speed, should the association need it in the future.