Increase tenant satisfaction scores with the 8x8 platform

Despite substantial financial pressures and the increasing need for social housing, the Regulator of Social Housing makes it clear that landlords must treat tenants with fairness and respect, and will be held accountable for failures in delivering tenant safety and satisfaction.

For many customer service leaders, this means improving communications and reviewing costs across all operations to be able to continue to fund essential repairs. This is leading them to seek technology solutions that can improve operational efficiency and connect data sources to empower staff with the knowledge they need to serve tenants better.

Housing associations operate in a highly-regulated environment, delivering a wide variety of tenant requests on a daily basis, including collecting debt, processing rentals, and ensuring prompt cost-effective property repairs. To keep tenants safe, staff need to maintain an increasing amount of knowledge and excel in communication.

Forward-thinking customer service leaders are increasingly using analytics and automation to simplify routine tasks and guide agents through conversations to provide real-time coaching, improve the service tenants receive and increase operational efficiency. Here we review some of the ways technology is helping them deliver on their goals.

Create an omnichannel experience

Creating an omnichannel experience simplifies the delivery of excellent customer service for housing associations. It centralises the management and administration of your communications and customer interactions.

An omnichannel environment not only makes it easier for tenants to contact you through their preferred channels (i.e., voice, video, chat or SMS), but it also makes it easier for agents to respond in a timely manner and improve those important tenant satisfaction scores.

8x8 Contact Center provides agents with a single view of each tenant’s interaction history across all channels. In turn, tenants can choose their preferred communication method for receiving important updates and service information to help keep their properties safe and well-maintained.

Customer service leaders are able to integrate their communication channels and CRM, with the flexibility to easily create and manage call routing plans and workflows using drag-and-drop technology to ensure tenants' enquiries are handled efficiently, important actions take place, compliance is adhered to, and essential information is captured.

Speech analytics, call recording and sentiment analysis not only provide essential information to verify compliance and behaviour expectations are met. They also deliver real-time analysis to guide agents through scripts and advise on the next best actions based on real-time tenant responses, enabling them to provide a better all-around experience.

Additionally, 8x8 integrates unified communications and contact center allowing for all communications to be centrally stored and automated surveys to ensure tenants’ voices are heard.

Reduce service call-out costs

Repairs and maintenance make up a considerable spend for housing associations, with Inside Housing reporting that Housing Associations spent a record £6.9bn on repairs and maintenance. To reduce costs, improve support, and often provide an instant fix, housing associations are increasingly adopting video Interaction. Using this technology, Platform Housing reported that engineers were able to successfully resolve 39% of issues remotely, many of which occurred out of hours, making considerable savings on unnecessary call-out charges.

8x8 Video Interaction allows an agent or engineer to easily instigate a video session, without leaving their call, to provide the agent or repairer with visibility of the incident. Tenants can easily be talked through re-setting boilers and appliances and incidents such as leaking taps cna be more accurately assessed. This results in faster fault resolution and eliminates unnecessary and expensive engineer callout charges. Video interactions are all stored centrally on the tenant’s record, which can provide essential information to alert agents to repetitive faults and highlight where preventative maintenance may be required.

In addition, automating reminders and SMS alerts for routine compliance testing and servicing simplify the processing of regular visits and where chargeable PCI/DSS payments can be made safely—all of which are attached to the tenant record for future reference.

Connect tenants, agents, and the back office

The 8x8 platform™ connects tenants, agents, and the back office with intuitive user interfaces for desktop and mobile devices to increase operational efficiency and tenant satisfaction.

Improving the quality of service is highly dependent on having up-to-the-minute analytics to measure success across multiple platforms, which is why housing associations are choosing to put 8x8’s with CRM integration, video interaction and cross-platform reporting at the core of their communications.

Ensuring a contact centre is effectively supported is critical in delivering the service the tenants require and will continue to be a time-consuming struggle for those without the right technology in place.

Download the guide to Increase Tenant Satisfaction and Safety.