Case Study: Housing Provider Improves Customer Relationships

David Morris shares his experience of improving customer engagement at emh homes, with help from Enghouse Interactive.

1. Put a focused team in place

It’s a good idea to develop a dedicated customer experience team that can act as a central intelligence hub and manage all types of feedback coming into the organisation, like compliments, complaints, or general feedback through surveys.

With a customer experience team, you can use the captured information to learn lessons from your mistakes and make sure you don’t repeat them. Having a central resource in place also makes it easier for you to implement an escalation process in the event that issues or problems require urgent attention or need rapid resolution.

2. Collaborate and bring in resources from across the business

Whether you are looking to set up a new customer contact centre or just enhance your existing one, never view it purely as a customer service, IT or telephony project. Instead you need to be looking at it as a business project that everyone across the business works on together.

You need to engage with customers and other stakeholders to work out what kind of service they are looking for and to decide how you are going to deliver it, what is likely to work and what investments you might need to undertake to make sure it happens.

3. Focus on what matters most to the customer

When faced with a myriad of new challenges, the best practice for housing associations is often to ‘take a step back’ and focus on what matters most to the resident. Our customers have consistently told us that it is the quality of the call handling and the knowledge of the advisors that is most important to them.

That’s why, in implementing the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center, we wanted to invest in the associated call recording and agent evaluation software. We have put that in place not only to monitor the quality of our service but to further develop and enhance our training to make sure advisors deliver optimum customer service.

4. Integrate your ICT systems

You don’t want your staff to have to use multiple applications – it’s confusing for them and inefficient. Use CTI integration to reduce the number of screens and applications your advisors need to use and you’ll see productivity and efficiency benefits as a direct result.

5. Keep things simple for the customer

It’s not just about making it straightforward for your own team, important though that is. You need to make sure the whole process is as simple as it can be for your customers. Technology can help you achieve this. It is helpful to have just one contact number for customers, backed by a streamlined contact centre that can deal with queries received and whatever means of contact is used.

For more information about Enghouse Interactive, visit their website.