Amillan

“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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Zippy’s Go Live was on the 19^th 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.

Now Zippy has had time to ‘bed in’ the statistics are surpassing all expectations.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Based in Kent, Folkestone and Hythe District Council serves a population of 108,000 covering 140 square miles. The council aims to boost the local economy & increase job opportunities, whilst supporting an attractive and vibrant place to live.

The council we’re looking for a high quality, functional, tailored solution for their Contact Centre and Unified Communications, laying the foundation for their Digital Transformation strategy by introducing innovative options for future business initiatives. The council also required that any solution would be developed alongside other elements of the FHDC IT Environment, including their Customer Relationship platform and familiar Microsoft Office 365 environment.

Amillan went about creating the ‘Platform for the Future’ for Folkestone and Hythe District council, incorporating Agility, Mobility, Collaboration and Professional Services.

The solution consisted of implementing a Microsoft Skype for Business platform to provide Unified communications with IP telephony and a cloud-based Enghouse multi-media Contact Centre with integrated call recording capability for the councils 250+ users.

The successful implementation of Amillan’s tailored solution allowed staff to work from home more easily, increasing productivity, and consolidate other services by moving from their headquarters to outreach offices.

“We set out looking for a solution that could drive our customer services programme, whilst facilitating a flexible working culture amongst our staff. Amillan were able to offer a tailored cloud solution that met all our expectations and will enable us to deliver on our commitment of an agile, unified workforce. We look forward to working with Amillan and Gamma as we further embrace Digital Tranformation”

About The University of Westminster

The University Of Westminster provides grounded, holistic education with wide horizons and opportunities, so that people from every background can realise their true potential, contributing to a richer, happier society.

The university boasts a rich and unique history and has been providing students with an education based on academic excellence, cultural engagement and personal enrichment since our inception as The Polytechnic Institution in 1838.

Amillan realised the importance of ensuring good sound communications and collaboration was paramount to the University as it strived to meet the ever-changing requirements and goals of its students and partners.

Our Relationship

The University of Westminster selected Amillan to provide new IP telephony, contact centre and unified communications solutions as part of a major internal restructuring and expansion. The aim of the restructure was to give staff a robust and reliable communications infrastructure capable of improving cross-campus and external collaboration, allowing the University to deliver more effective corporate and student services.

Designing and implementing unified communications across the entire university has achieved the institution’s vision of creating communications service for the future, allowing staff to connect cross-campus and giving them access to IP telephony, softphone applications and unified communications tools based on their individual requirements.

Having this insight into the Universities current telephony landscape and requirements, Amillan procured a Telephone System Maintenance contract for their existing IP telephony system. This included services such as Problem & Incident Management, Reporting, Field Engineering, 24/7, telephone assistance and much more.

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.

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.

Dixons Carphone plc is Europe’s leading specialist electrical and telecommunications retailer and services company, employing over 42,000 people in eight countries. Dixons Carphone’s primary brands include Currys PC World and Carphone Warehouse in the UK & Ireland.

With a full range of services and support, they make it easy for their customers to discover, choose and enjoy the right technology for them, throughout the life of the product.

We began working with Dixons International in 2001 when Amillan was chosen to provide a corporate telephony solution. Over time, Amillan became more involved in the business and introduced new technologies and solutions to DSG as their business grew and expanded across the UK and into Europe.

– 700 Currys PC World stores
– 17 administration sites
– 3,000 agent contact centre
– 22,000 users

Support is provided 24×7 as part of a managed services contract and Amillan operates a branded help desk for stores personnel to assist them in the day-to-day running of their retail outlets.

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.

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.