Case Study: Housing Group Connects Customer Experience

Together Housing Group has connected its customer experience across 5 contact centres with help from mplsystems.

Together Housing Group is a provider of quality homes in the North of England. They experience high levels of customer service enquiries from over 50,000 tenants, managing a wide range of customer enquiries including repairs and maintenance, lettings, welfare reform and anti-social behaviour – resulting in over 38,000 calls a month.

The problem

Following the coming together of the five housing associations in April 2011, the customer service centres were all relying on different telephony platforms, with some centres having up to 15 different phone numbers for customer service enquiries.

As a result, Together Housing were struggling to deliver a consistent level of customer service across the group. They started looking for ways to knit these disparate systems together to provide a “one call for all” customer service offering.

The solution

Together Housing selected mplsystems for the design and implementation of the solution as a result of the high levels of flexibility offered to suit their specific business requirements.

The solution also had the ability to scale and accommodate any future business growth, enabling them to extend the solution when needed, rather than having to procure third-party systems for additional work.

Working closely with Together Housing’s team, mplsystems designed a unique contact centre solution that brings together all calls from the multiple social housing brands within the group into one secure system.

Although currently operating on an East/West basis, the system allows the possibility of the five regional contact centres to work as one virtual team with calls being intelligently routed from one call centre to another, enabling them to share resource and improve productivity.

With the implementation of an intelligent desktop, the customer service team are now able to resolve customer enquiries regardless of the housing group involved, whilst maintaining the local identity of each association.

The agent desktop identifies the customer as soon as the call is connected and presents their data on a single user interface, allowing the agent to deal with the call more efficiently.

The solution also provides customers with a call-back option, which means once their enquiry reaches the front of the queue an agent will call them back, avoiding customers having to spend long periods on hold. These call-backs are often within a 10 -20 minute timeframe and subsequently over-exceeding customer expectations.

The benefits

Together Housing now have a single, secure and reliable solution that has helped achieve their objective of working together as a group and as a result, customers are now experiencing faster response times and a consistently high level of customer service.

Together Housing are now planning a second phase of the project with mplsystems, where they will integrate email, social and webchat customer service in to the intelligentContact system.

This will provide Together Housings tenants with a true multichannel solution, and be effectively managed through the agent desktop to help provide a seamless customer experience regardless of channel.

“Each of the partners was operating on separate telephony systems, which was clearly not suitable if we were to realise the benefits of a group structure,” said Stephen Batley, Group Head of Customer Services. “We are now able to work as a group, rather than as separate organisations, and this has benefited us as a business as well as our customers and the service they receive through the customer service centre.”

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