Leading communications integrator, Amillan, has been named as a supplier on Crown Commercial Service’s Network Services 3 (NS3) framework (RM6116).
Amillan’s success in being named as a supplier will allow them to give public sector organisations easier access to its expertise in telephony and communications technology as Amillan can provide servicers on the following Lots:
Amillan underwent a rigorous selection process where applicants were evaluated for multiple service lots, based on multiple criteria, including service offerings, implementation skills, service delivery, customer references, and experience.
Patrick Daly, Managing Director, Amillan, said: “Amillan has seen tremendous success via our previous listing on Network Services 2, and we are delighted to be successfully selected once again on the new Network Services 3 framework. This award continues to give us access to an expanded pipeline of public sector procurement opportunities and will enable us to transact business much more quickly and seamlessly with existing and new public sector customers. It will help streamline the whole process both for us and our clients.”
The NS3 framework is for the provision of telecommunications and network services and can be used by the whole of the UK Public Sector and their associated bodies and agencies, the voluntary sector, charities, and/or other private organisations acting as managing agents or procuring on behalf of the public sector delivering services of a public nature.
NS3 aims to simplify and speed up communications and networking procurement for public sector organisations, with pre-defined and agreed contract terms and conditions and a shortlist of pre-approved suppliers providing a wide range of services. The framework will run until at least 2025.
Crown Commercial Service supports the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services. In 2022/23, CCS helped the public sector to achieve commercial benefits equal to £3.8 billion – supporting world-class public services that offer best value for taxpayers.
About Amillan
Amillan is a leading solutions integrator delivering unified communications, contact centre, data networking and connectivity solution, on-premise or in the cloud. For more information, please visit, www.amillan.co.uk
About Crown Commercial Service
Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is an Executive Agency of the Cabinet Office, supporting the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services.
To find out more about CCS, visit: www.crowncommercial.gov.uk
Follow us on Twitter: @gov_procurement
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/2827044
“Delivering better value from every interaction” – How the Enghouse contact centre platform has helped ForHousing provide an enhanced service to tenants
Social housing provider, ForHousing, owns and manages 24,000 homes in North-West England, and delivers housing management services for other landlords. Part of the ForViva Group, they are focused on improving lives for their communities, customers, and staff, along with delivering affordable accommodation for their tenants.
ForHousing are passionate about the service they provide to their tenants. Back in 2016, most of their customer interactions were predominately voice-based. With calls on the rise ForHousing wanted a scalable “single pane of glass” solution which would integrate with critical business applications and support new digital channels, such as webchat, emails and social media to relieve the pressure on call handlers and resolve tenants’ queries more quickly and efficiently.
Angela Worthington, Group Assistant Director of Customer Experience, ForViva (parent company of ForHousing) said: “We also wanted to support additional capabilities including skills-based call-routing, and the ability to take card payments and not record, which together would allow us to offer an even more efficient service to our tenants.”
Their existing contact centre solution did not offer the functionality needed to support this new initiative. It was also inflexible when it came to making small changes to the system such as rerouting calls or putting a recorded message in place. Each new request had to be submitted to the IT team which made it difficult to be react to anything.
ForHousing decided to go out to tender to find a solution that could deliver on their requirements.
The Solution
Working with their IT partner, Amillan, they selected the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (CC) solution. CC provides multi-channel capability, giving tenants greater choice in how they engage with ForHousing. To complement CC, ForHousing also implemented the Enghouse Interactive Quality Management suite (QMS), including call recording and score card functionality to monitor agents performance, and the Teleopti workforce management tool.
The initial Customer Service Centre implementation had around 40 users. With CC in place, Amillan has helped ForViva bring onboard over 100 additional users and extend the use of multimedia throughout when it bought Liberty Group, scaling CC to accommodate this growth. ForViva was quick to see positive results.
Reaping the rewards
One of the advantages of choosing Enghouse as its contact centre provider was the range of solutions it had to offer. Previously, ForHousing had multiple customer-facing solutions in place from different suppliers. By standardising on CC, it was able to utilise other applications such as their web-based Wallboard. This meant that agents had full visibility of performance data and call queue status no matter where they set up work for the day.
ForHousing also benefits from Call-back functionality. When call volumes are high and it is difficult to get through to an agent, tenants can now request a call back. This has helped to increase customer satisfaction as they no longer have to wait around in a queue, but it has also contributed to increased agent productivity and improved call centre efficiency.
The new solution also integrates with their CRM solution, Aareon. This gives agents instant access to more detailed information about their residents, enabling them to make more informed decisions and has resulted in increased first contact resolution.
Moreover, with the previous contact centre solution in place, it had been difficult to on board new users or support people working from home. With CC, it was possible to mobilise the contact centre team, with no disruption to service. It was easy to train people; add new users, route calls and set up new queues. The solution also offered ForHousing greater flexibility during lockdown. Some agents had to home school making it difficult for them to take calls, but using CC, ForHousing were able to allow them to focus on email instead.
Challenges in the management and processing of calls were also addressed by CC’s call recording capability. The system was PCI compliant as it automatically paused and resumed recordings when agents were taking card details. Screen and call recording along with score card functionality enables Team Leaders to access agents in a fair and consistent fashion. This has helped increase agent morale, reduce staff attrition, and improve the customer experience.
“Over the last year the Team Leader’s role has changed significantly”, added Angela. “With their teams now working from home they have lost that face-to-face contact and the ability to offer support when they can see an agent struggling. The Quality Management Suite has been invaluable during this time, allowing team leaders to monitor activity and intervene when an agent needs help.
“We also have greater visibility of the types of calls we receive, enabling us to spot any trends in the nature of enquiries, or provide evidence of any burning issues or repair complaints that may need actioning. And with the integrated survey module we can get a full picture of the customer experience”.
Chatbots and automation – Extending the benefits of the contact centre
ForHousing wanted to bring more automation into the contact centre and extend their hours to offer a 24/7 service to its customers. Working with Amillan they selected Converse360 to provide a service automation platform that can deliver web bots, speech bots and virtual assistants, all seamlessly integrated with CC.
The virtual assistant feature has been invaluable in taking pressure off the contact centre through the pandemic. Also, if the interaction with the virtual assistant needs to be passed through to the contact centre the details are automatically passed onto the agent so that they have a full history.
The virtual assistant is now handling around 60% of the chats that come through the ForHousing website and they have seen a 26% uplift in the number of monthly web chat sessions, within three months of it going live. The average handling time for live chat has gone down by around 90 seconds per session as a result.
With the virtual assistant dealing with many of the simpler interactions ForHousing can devote more time to calls coming through the Enghouse CC and has therefore improved its first call resolution rate. At the same time, agents can deliver an enhanced experience to tenants.
Reporting and management has also been transformed. ForHousing now have full “cradle to grave” reporting across all customer interaction types, whether it is the virtual assistance, voice or social media channels. This has provided greater insight into contact centre performance which in turn has helped drive down costs.
Delivering an exceptional tenant experience
Angela said: “It is not just about housing anymore. It is about improving lives and creating communities that grow and in which people are happy and want to live in. Equally, it is no longer just about tenants phoning up to pay their rent or report a repair. Calls are becoming much longer. Our average handle time has increased 10-25% in time terms because tenants have more complex needs, but thanks to the virtual assistant and the Enghouse Interactive CC, our agents are able to spend more time with them and add greater value to each interaction.”
Angela added: “We have found CC flexible and easy to adjust. We can now open the contact centre outside office hours and bring staff working from home online to deal with queries whenever we need them. Also the flexibility of the solution has made it easier to bring on new lines for specific functions, such as pharmacy calls during lockdown, and simpler to route calls to specific experts, as and when required.”
Over the longer-term, ForHousing is confident in the ability of the contact centre platform to deliver sustained benefits. The association is looking at moving away from on-premise solutions towards a cloud-based platform and it recognises the potential this offers in enabling it to make use of the data and analytics it has at its disposal to offer an even better service to tenants.
ForHousing is a forward-thinking social organisation whose members own and manage more than 24,000 homes across the North West.
ForHousing is about improving lives for communities, customers, and staff, delivering excellent quality, affordable accommodation, and housing services across the region.
Committed to creating positive opportunities for its customers, ForHousing build much needed affordable homes, empower people to gain training, secure employment, whilst also providing access to health and wellbeing support, creating sustainable and safe communities.
Amillan have worked closely with ForHousing (and the wider ForViva Group) since the introduction of a new multichannel contact centre platform in 2016 and have become a valuable technology partner, helping them in delivering their commitments to provide high customer satisfaction. In 2019 Amillan began a partnership with Converse360 who offer an innovative virtual assistant solution built upon an industry leading service automation platform.
THE PROBLEM
ForHousing were looking to reduce costs within their current contact centre solution whilst also maintaining and increasing customer satisfaction for their tenants. They have a customer service team that are extremely busy, with most tenant interactions provided through a manual process. This meant agents were handling thousands of incoming voice calls, email enquiries and webchat sessions every month, with the number of interactions continually increasing due to the pressures of Covid-19.
ForHousing have always strived to improve how they communicate with their tenants by utilising the latest digital communication technology, they recognized these technologies could help uncover more efficient ways of delivering their current services, streamline processes and reduce costs.
As with most Housing Associations, voice is still the media platform of choice, however this meant only limited services could be offered to tenants at night or at weekends. ForHousing wanted to continue offering voice but also promote new media channels such as Web Chat and expansion into social media. Providing additional channels would allow many tenants to perform self service, which after extensive research they concluded could easily handle simple questions and by following workflows they could even provide interactive responses for more in-depth processes.
ForHousing were looking for automation which could deliver the following benefits:
ForHousing recognised that the key to providing this service successfully is avoid creating a technology silo, the automation needed to integrate with wider business and communications environment (Housing Management Systems, CRM, Contact Centre) and be able to communicate across all media channels that the audience require.
THE SOLUTION
ForHousing engaged Amillan as their contact centre partner of choice, to assist with the automation project. Amillan worked with Converse360 to provide a Service Automation Platform that can deliver Web Bots, Speech Bots and Digital Humans, seamlessly integrating with the Enghouse Interactive Contact Centre Platform which was already used at ForHousing.
It was proposed to set up a dedicated Cloud based instance of this platform for an initial period of 12 months which will provide the evidence required to show the cost savings achievable whilst improving excellent customer service standards for ForHousing’s tenants. This period would also allow ForHousing to plan for the expansion of services, with potential integration into housing management and other CRM or knowledge-based systems.
THE IMPLEMENTATION
Following acceptance of the proposal ForHousing were extremely keen to progress the solution as quickly as possible and wanted to be fully involved in building the FAQ’s and Workflows for the solution. Amillan provided ForHousing with extensive user training, split over several sessions, thus making sure the ForHousing staff had the knowledge, ability, and tools to be self-sufficient to build new FAQ’s and Workflows.
The platform is based on embeds technology from the four leading conversational AI vendors; AWS, Google, IBM Watson and Microsoft, therefore if ForHousing’s requirements evolve going forward, the “Best of Breed” solution can pivot to meet the new requirements.
The training was also followed by a workshop to gather in greater detail the ForHousing requirements around colour schemes, company branding, opening, and closing statements and the general design for the ForHousing Web Bot. The name and design of the Web Bot was devised through tenant consultation and the tenants voted to call the Bot “Zippy” to give a friendly, more personable public persona to the Bot.
BUILDING WORKFLOWS
ForHousing created most of the FAQ’s and Workflows for Zippy themselves, utilising the Contact Centre team to build them. The feedback from ForHousing was that process was very easy, enabling self-sufficiency with Amillan and Converse360’s technical team on hand to assist if required. ForHousing found the Bot solution easy to build and only needed to involve the IT Department when Zippy was ready to Go Live and a simple line of code was added to ForHousing’s Web Page.
The workflows that ForHousing built cover:
TESTING
A testing instance of Zippy which was identical to the final solution was provided during implementation, this allowed ForHousing to review the look and feel before go-live. Testing itself took a couple of weeks, making sure the workflows functioned correctly and adjusting them where necessary.
THE LAUNCH
Zippy’s Go Live was on the 19th October and tenants began embracing the Web Bot’s features instantly.
Zippy has been trained to respond to enquiries across a range of topics and there are multiple workflows where the questions asked lead to additional detailed information being requested before responding.
ForHousing wanted to reduce the number of routine FAQ calls which come through from tenants to the Contact Centre and as such would point the tenants to Zippy for self-service.
ForHousing also wanted to reduce agent chat time, so when an enquiry does get through to an agent, Zippy has gathered all the relevant information and able to transfer this to the live agent, when required.
Zippy can offer the tenant the option to speak to a customer advisor at any time and should the Virtual Assistant not understand the tenants request, then Zippy will hand-off to a Live Agent to continue the conversation. If the tenant clicks the agent button the system will engage with the Contact Centre, which will look at agent availability, advise the tenant of the estimated wait time and route the chat to a live agent.
In the first week Zippy had:
THE RESULTS
Now Zippy has had time to ‘bed in’ the statistics are surpassing all expectations.
A review of the monthly statistics are as follows:
Summary of Statistics
Total Time Saved every month equates to 391 Hours or 52 Days or 2.6 Agents
The statistics show that Zippy is answering most tenants’ questions without agent involvement. As the Web Bot is being constantly trained by the ForHousing staff, Zippy will be able to answer even more questions in the future.
THE FUTURE
ForHousing have already seen the benefits of the Web Bot solution deployed, providing potential cost savings as well as the increase in customer satisfaction.
ForHousing, Amillan and Converse360 are looking to expand Zippy into Phase Two, with integration into Aareon QL, ForHousing’s housing management system. This would mean that tenants could use the Web Bot to:
ForHousing continue to seek new ways to innovate and improve their customer service with communication and automation technology. A Speech Bot version of Zippy is being considered to intelligently automate voice responses by phone. Also, ForHousing are considering other add-ons for both Web and Speech, such as the customer survey feature.
About Yorkshire Housing
The Yorkshire Housing group was formed in 1999 and became Yorkshire Housing in 2008. Today they manage more than 18,000 affordable and social rent homes across 20 local authorities. They are a not-for-profit organisation, meaning all earnings are re-invested into the services provided.
Yorkshire Housing’s ambition is for everyone to have the opportunity to live in a quality home they can afford. To do this they are growing as a business, building 3,000 homes by 2021 and increasing the range of services available.
Yorkshire Housing had taken the decision to move 250 staff to a new central location, with the focus on increasing customer service, whilst boosting staff productivity and efficiency.
The Solution
Amillan was chosen to supply Yorkshire Housing with a Unified Communications and IP telephony solution for it’s new ‘Corporate Centre’ location in Leeds, together with a new cabling and data network infrastructure as part of a wider technology roll-out. This encompassed five additional office locations and numerous satellite offices across Yorkshire.
The unified communications solution provided Yorkshire Housing with advanced presence capabilities – knowing who is available to handle enquiries or to call-out to sites, skills-based routing to transfer calls to the most appropriate person, collaboration, conferencing, and mobility for its workforce meaning that staff were able to be contacted whether in the office, at a satellite location or working remotely.
“A key factor in the success of the project has been Amillan’s precise and encompassing project management. The fact that one company has been able to provide all aspects of the solution for Yorkshire Housing Ltd has made the whole installation much more straightforward, combined with its ability to carefully manage not only their own installation but to have provided co-ordination with third parties too. This has proved invaluable, and we are delighted with the project.”
About ForViva
ForViva is a force for good. We challenge inequalities and make a difference to people’s lives. We’re about profit for purpose and this means we reinvest profits from across the Group to have a positive impact and create vibrant and safe communities. The entire ForViva Group is united behind one shared vision: Improved Lives. ForViva sets the standard and offers direction, allowing group members Liberty and ForHousing to achieve their missions.
ForHousing is a progressive landlord that provides quality homes and places, making more things possible for more people. It owns and manages more than 24,000 homes and places, improving lives by delivering real change and making more things possible for more people.
Liberty focuses on being the go-to people for property services, thinking ahead to deliver personal, smart and altogether better property services across gas, repairs, maintenance and construction. By working for good, working together and focusing on simplicity, we make things happen.
The Project
Amillan’s solution is built upon Enghouse’s EICC, a market leading contact centre platform in the housing sector. Multi-channel capability will give customers greater choice in how they engage with ForViva, with seamless telephone, e-mail, SMS, live webchat and social media communication channels all supported by the platform.
The chosen solution will also enable more efficient agent management and improvements in service quality via integrated call and screen recording, speech analytics and Teleopti workforce management modules.
About Warwickshire County Council
Warwickshire County Council provides for a community population of over 500,000 with public services, healthcare, education and social care. As an organisation, there are 4,000 users across 15+ sites, with many mobile users across the county.
Like many local authorities, Warwickshire was challenged to continue to deliver excellent public services on increasingly tighter budgets. To achieve this the Council recognised they must make their services more efficient, integrated and make the best possible use of new technologies and innovation.
The Project
‘Project Connect’ is Warwickshire County Council’s strategic initiative to implement a new IP Telephony solution in support of its ‘Smarter Working’ agenda. The aim is to ‘Empower every member of staff to connect with others where and when and how they need.
Amillan is currently in the process of deploying a new Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch solution to the Council’s 4,000 users. Key success factors for the Council are to provide a cohesive experience from any user device, as well as integrating with several existing messaging applications including Google Apps, legacy IP telephony, data connectivity and centralised reporting.
About Trent & Dove Housing
Trent & Dove Housing offers well maintained, affordable homes across East Staffordshire, South Derbyshire and North West Leicestershire. This includes 6,000 properties, ranging from sheltered accommodation to family homes and everything in between.
Trent & Dove housing are driven to make a difference in people’s lives and reduce homelessness in the region. Their aspiration is to be an organisation of over 10,000 homes by 2022. By providing affordable homes and a wide range of supporting services they enable people and communities to thrive and enjoy life.
The housing association identified a need for improved reporting from its telephony system to ensure the organisation delivers the services that it offers to its clients. This included peak-time staffing of phones, extended service hours, outbound calling and ‘first point of contact’ resolution. In addition, a new LAN solution was required by Trent & Dove Housing, to both support the communication solution and protect against system failures that would result in SLA failures for the housing association.
The Solution
Amillan implemented Unified Communications and Contact Centre platform with a total of 213 users and 20 contact centre agents, and a replacement LAN solution to support it. The Unified Communications solution provides a call distribution system operating across all sites by routing calls to the first available qualified staff member in the shortest time.
Amillan also replaced Trent & Dove Housing’s multiple telephony systems with a single solution distributed across all sites, which provided a platform to support hot-desking, home working, remote contact centre agents, audio and video conferencing. The solution also gave the housing association a single, centralised management system for their communication platform.
The LAN solution provided abundant network bandwidth for voice, data and UC, with the additional requirement to support video over IP. Amillan designed and implemented a network that is resilient so in the event of an appliance failure, the fibre route will be maintained, and Trent & Dove Housing’s SLAs will not be affected.
After just three months of the system going live, Trent & Dove Housing reported a 50% reduction in time taken to answer calls; from 45 seconds to just 22 seconds. In addition, the average call length was reduced by 25%, helping Trent & Dove achieve their objective of faster call resolution. This improvement in answering time also reduced the abandoned call rate from 25% previously, to 8% on the new solution.
Amillan’s solution also provided a reduction in costs for Trent & Dove Housing. With the single system replacing multiple legacy systems, the ongoing maintenance costs were greatly reduced. The rationalised solution provided Trent & Dove Housing with a central management system which reduced operational costs and simplified the administration of the communications system.
“We selected Amillan’s solution on the basis of the wealth of features the solution provides, which we felt would increase our levels of customer service and boost the productivity of our staff.”
About Futures Housing
Futures Housing Group is an innovative business which provides nearly 10,000 affordable homes throughout the East Midlands, owns a social enterprise, a commercial development company and co-owns a further education provider.
FHG provide more than 6,000 homes in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire and more than 3,500 homes in Northamptonshire – but their ambitious business plan includes the development of more than 1,000 homes for rent, homes for sale, shared ownership and private-market rent by 2020.
Futures also provides excellent housing and support services for our customers and the local community.
The Project
As a forward-thinking organisation, Futures Housing Group was keen to implement a new communications environment that would not just allow all staff to benefit from cutting edge mobility, collaboration and flexible working capabilities, but also extend multimedia functionality externally to enable better engagement with its customers and partners.
The chosen solution of Microsoft Skype for Business, with integrated Enghouse EICC contact centre enables communication and productivity improvements throughout the organisation via voice, email, instant messaging, video and desktop sharing/collaboration. Customers now have greater choices in how they communicate with Futures Housing, including telephone, e-mail, SMS, live webchat and via social media, supporting the Group’s vision to allow its customers to help shape and develop their products and services.
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