Derwent Living Deliver Coronavirus Solution in Three Days 

The problem

Derwent Living recognised that lockdown was going to be detrimental for many of their tenants. An increase in Universal Credit claims was just the start. There was a whole range of information that they needed to communicate.

The social housing provider wanted to react quickly and scale up tenant communications to deal with the increased workload, but they knew that not all tenants have access to a mobile phone.

They needed to find a way to contact customers en masse and direct them to useful information – without drawing resources away from other areas of the organisation…

“We were looking for a system that we could control, that would allow us to communicate with tenants at the necessary scale, primarily unidirectionally, while maintaining high levels of customer service and satisfaction.” Richard Cookson – Head of Income, ITC and Processing, Derwent Living.

The solution

We knew that the ‘voice’ telephone channel would be the most effective way for Derwent Living to engage with tenants – especially the most vulnerable. This would also allow us to automate a communications journey that could be updated as the coronavirus situation developed.

Within three days, we had adapted our product offering to create a dynamic process that allowed the housing association to handle varying levels of capacity within their internal call centre.

The system signposted tenants to information on the Derwent Living website, providing the level of engagement required during this period while relieving call-handling teams from a surge of inbound enquiries.

The result

By listening to Derwent Living’s needs and taking a consultative approach, Voicescape were able to quickly develop a cost-effective, technological solution for a very current problem.

The success of the project was further driven by speed of implementation and the ability to adapt to a dynamic and rapidly changing environment that is really impacting tenants and landlords.

• A conversion rate of 20% within two days
• 648 website page views in 48 hours (compared to 1,000 views per month)
• Capacity to send up to 60,000 messages per month

“One of the extra benefits of this campaign is that tenants have the assurance of receiving reliable information; they are not going off to sources that could potentially be inaccurate or unnecessarily overloading other public services that are already overstretched. If our tenants want to speak to a member of the team, that is still always an option.” Richard Cookson – Head of Income, ITC and Processing, Derwent Living.