How The Hyde Group Reduced Their Caseload by 65% and Beat Their FY24 Arrears Target

The Hyde Group is one of London’s leading housing associations and a G15 member. They serve approximately 50,000 tenancies/homeowners – from the south coast and Brighton to as far north as Peterborough – their mission is to provide good quality, affordable rented homes, shared ownership homes and landlord services.

Hyde stay true to this mission via a number of core principles – one of which involves ‘maintaining a sharp focus on operating efficiencies with prudent investment’. Since 2021, Hyde has adopted Voicescape’s Caseload Manager solution to help streamline income processes, manage arrears caseloads and get ahead of the socio-economic challenges facing the sector.

The Challenge

Hyde’s income officers struggled to get through their weekly caseload using their legacy income analytics product.  They were managing around 1,400 properties each, of which approximately 400 were in arrears at any time. So they initiated a process to select  a new technology provider in 2019 with the goal  to reduce rent arrears  and find a more efficient way to work through their caseloads. 

Then came COVID-19, which presented further challenges by limiting the actions they could take against rising caseloads. With a bigger backlog and a stronger need to get their income team back on track, they turned to Voicescape in 2021. Starting with our Collections solution, we began to enhance Hyde’s income process through automated outbound SMS texting. 

The Solution

Instead of manually reaching out to customers to collect arrears, Hyde’s team fed data across different portfolios into Voicescape Collections, leading to inbound contact from their tenants. Through intelligent automation, our solution enabled them to contact more customers with the correct engagement strategy in line with their Standard Operating Procedure.

After experiencing success with this streamlined method of engagement, The Hyde Group explored the potential of also integrating Voicescape Caseload Manager into their operations to help them prioritise cases, free up staff resources  and better serve their customers. Our team worked closely with Hyde to analyse and test their arrears caseload, determine ROI targets and tailor the implementation ready for going live. They first launched to their general needs tenure followed by their homeowner tenure a few months later, taking forward the learnings and challenges from their initial launch. 

“Voicescape’s automation was the first big win for us. We toyed around with the previous system that we had in place to try and reduce our workload and get through our caseload each week, but we just weren’t achieving it. So the automation was the first big trigger that really helped us reduce our caseloads to a workable level – that was a clear win.” 

– Ladi Joseph, Head of Income

The Results

Naturally, Hyde’s income officers had to develop confidence in Caseload Manager’s data and trust in the AI’s recommendations over their own manual findings. Over time, there was a positive feedback loop of trust where the more faith officers placed in the solution, the better results they saw, and the more the Caseload Manager’ Machine Learning capabilities learned about the nuances and finer details of their customer behaviours and actions required for future decisions. This was then positively reflected in their subsequent figures…

Since going live, Hyde’s income officers are now presented with around 140 weekly cases on average, compared with ~400 before Caseload Manager  – an incredible 65% reduction!  Yet the technology was only part of the success story.  Ongoing collaboration with their team enabled us to rapidly respond to feedback and find new ways for them to do more with the system – quickly providing solutions to accelerate their processes further. 

Ultimately, this enabled The Hyde Group to finish their financial year in 2024 at 4.81%, well ahead of their target of 5.3% and below the £13m projected arrears target!

“Our income team were used to just working through lists and spreadsheets, so this was a very new way of working for them – not seeing all their cases but only seeing what they needed to do and trusting the AI’s recommendations into which cases to focus on. But when they trusted the system and worked with it, they experienced significant reductions in caseloads allowing for less wasted effort and more meaningful customer engagement.

“We’ve seen great results already for this financial year, and we're on course to have an even better year. I’ve got to say a lot of that is thanks to Voicescape.”

 

– Ladi Joseph, Head of Income

The Future

Following the successful integration of Voicescape Collections and Caseload Manager at The Hyde Group, they’re now looking to expand how they can utilise our bespoke product suite to overcome more challenges and create further possibilities. This includes adapting their outbound engagement strategy to incorporate emails for their shared ownership tenure, finding a solution for 48-week tenancies, and enhancing the reporting suite.

If you’d like to discuss how Voicescape can help streamline your income processes and reduce arrears debt in a sector where it’s rising, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.