Remaining compliant in the social housing sector is an everyday battle consisting of volatile socioeconomic challenges and changing legislation. Impressively, many housing associations manage to regularly meet the mark. But at what cost?
With the compliance landscape evolving at such a rapid pace, a rethink of the way we engage tenants is needed in order to evolve alongside it. Voicescape ran with that thought some time ago, creating intuitive automated solutions that are taking the manual burden away from housing associations when it comes to engaging and, in this case, appointment booking…
In our webinar, we unpacked the many compliance challenges at play, the various applications of our Voicescape Compliance solution as a means to overcome them, and how Progress Housing Group uses this technology to reduce no-access and continuously improve customer engagement. Discover the key takeaways here.
Consistent no-access and the associated costs around this can take a serious toll on both your finances and your team as they work harder to keep up and remain 100% compliant. This can turn compliance into a box-ticking exercise, and a costly one at that. Take no-access for example – our client research tells us that, on average, a no-access visit for gas and electrical safety checks costs around £75. And in a live poll during the webinar, over 60% of respondents identified this as the biggest compliance challenge they face.
Other poll responses for key challenges included repairs backlogs, DMC, excessive volume of letters and a lack of tenant engagement. The consumer regulation standards, along with new legislation like Awaab’s Law and the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, make these challenges even more crucial to overcome – reinforcing the need for more streamlined methods of engagement.
These are all familiar challenges, but perhaps you want more tools to support your teams to tackle them head-on. Ultimately, the sector needs better ways to engage with tenants to reduce no-access and take the manual burden away from teams. This is where Voicescape comes in.
Voicescape Compliance automates outbound contact around appointment booking, giving your tenants more control over visits and an easy means of confirming or rescheduling appointments. Combining personalisation, behavioural science and nudge theory, we help you deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time – all tailored to your specific housing association to help you remain compliant.
One of the most common applications of our solution is to reduce no-access around gas and electric safety appointments, though of course it can be used to increase access to homes for a plethora of reasons. The automated nature of the technology also helps reduce the volume of letters sent on top of compulsory escalations, as well as optimising the booking process by getting the customer involved and helping manage cyclical workload. On average, our customer base has reduced no-access by 20-30%.
As our customers become more attuned to the capabilities and benefits of our solution, more use cases are coming to light that harness the same streamlined method of automated contact. As well as gas and electric safety appointments, Voicescape Compliance can be used to tackle:
- Responsive repairs and planned works – Post-COVID, some of our customers are experiencing backlogs of 3,000-5,000 outstanding appointments to be booked or rescheduled. With our help, you can reduce the repairs backlog by quickly identifying what’s still needed and what can be allocated to contractors.
- DMC – Following up on DMC appointments to ensure living conditions remain safe can be a laborious task. Our solution can help you manage and monitor current and historic appointments. For example, by using automated outbound contact, you can quickly and persistently reach anyone who’s had a repair in the last two years, proactively engaging to ensure issues are resolved.
The business cases go on, with the potential for Voicescape Compliance to help with fire risk assessments, stock condition surveys, Legionella assessments, or anything appointment related where access is essential.
At this point in the webinar we welcomed Graham Coleman, M&E Compliance Manager at Progress Housing Group, to share how he has been using our solution. He also discussed the various ways he plans to harness it in the near future…
Graham reinforced earlier poll results by identifying no-access as one of the biggest issues that his gas servicing team faces. Aligning with Voicescape’s findings, he calculated the cost of in-house engineers’ time, fuel, admin, additional letters and injunction preparations to a total of £75 per no-access visit.
Pre-Voicescape, Graham sought feedback from his team on how to tackle the situation and found that access rates improved when they called ahead before appointments – they just didn’t have the time or resources to do this consistently. Almost 18 months after this feedback was collated, Graham saw a LinkedIn article about our Compliance solution and decided to contact us.
Following a demo of the product, approval was given from both the team and their stakeholders before the procurement process was completed. We then helped Graham configure his organisation’s preferred setup, which entailed automating outbound calls to encourage a call back request – this prevented customers being redirected into a call queue.
We also customised timescales for outbound contact – and brought in a member of their team to record the messages with a familiar voice. Our IT teams then connected with each other, staff were trained on the system, and the solution went live in November 2023.
We’ve just signed a three-year contract with Voicescape, and within the first year it’s already paid for itself and will pay for itself three times over on that basis.”
- Graham Coleman, M&E Compliance Manager at Progress Housing Group
Graham is now looking to the future and a number of other use cases that our solution can help him solve. These include cleansing contact details (by using segmented data from the solution around incorrect numbers or no contact made) and outcome tracking (identifying what percentage of confirmed, rescheduled and no-response scenarios resulted in no-access). He also wants to pursue its potential to help with repairs backlog, stock condition surveys, feedback and rent arrears.
The webinar attendees were fascinated by Graham’s success story and had a number of questions for him.
Q: When do you apply for injunctions? On the third no-access?
Graham: We start the application at the third no-access visit, or if we get to the point when it’s within 30 days of expiry – that’s when we pass it over to our housing team. They might then further try to engage the customer and get us in, but while they’re doing that they will start to prepare the injunction.
Q: We are also 100% compliant and struggle with access and its time-consuming nature. We use a mix of letters, phone calls and emails, and offer the choice of many appointment times. Is the fact that you can make multiple calls where you see the most benefit?
Graham: The work that goes on behind the scenes of ‘100% compliance’ is astronomical. Voicescape offers to take some of that workload away. We also send letters and make phone calls, but this solution gives you the chance to automate those outbound calls. You can choose how many times to call someone – we have it set to three.
Q: Most gas contractors have an online portal or SMS service for rearranging first and second service requests. Do you know why Voicescape delivers better results for you?
Voicescape: It’s the combination of behavioural science, nudge theory, a friendly local voice and automated persistence.
Graham: Voicescape does leave a text message if the call doesn’t go through, and the text message has the same options for response as the outbound call. But I believe the calls do provide that extra layer of engagement.
Q: Do you have a DLO for gas servicing?
Graham: Yes, our ‘general needs’ are all based in the North West and our DLO covers that exclusively. We also have about 1,500 supported living properties which are spread from Scotland down to the Isle of Man – they also cover that. The only time we use a contractor is for some commercial servicing and the harder-to-reach properties. Our DLO covers more than 95% of our gas servicing.
Q: Can the number be blocked by residents?
Voicescape: We work with our customers to make sure that their organisation has a communication strategy with tenants and residents prior to our systems being put in place.
Graham: The number appears as the local code, and we’ve not had any feedback from anybody trying to block the number.
Q: What happens if the call encounters a BT Call Minder or similar call-screening system?
Voicescape: As we prioritise mobile numbers we don’t tend to encounter systems like BT’s Call Minder. If we did call a landline that had it enabled, it’s likely that our call waiting message would be played to the customer first. They would then decide whether to accept the call or not. Our call waiting message is configured per use case and announces the reason for the call from the landlord.
Q: Would we still need to send first appointment letters for gas safety checks, or can we rely on Voicescape and then follow up with no-access letters?
Graham: We haven’t yet changed any of our lettering process – people will still need to go through the first, second and third access appointments and follow these up with letters. The letters that you could look to drop are the ones in between that are used more as touchpoints – this is something we will consider in the near future.
You can check out the FULL timestamped webinar replay here!
If you’d like to learn more about improving tenant engagement to not only reduce no-access but benefit from the powerful knock-on effects of doing so, please download our free whitepaper today.