Thirteen Transform Tenant Engagement with Personalised Automated Campaigns

Thirteen Housing Group manage 36,000 properties spanning from North Tyneside to Yorkshire. To help accelerate their mission of providing fantastic homes and services by brilliant people, they are always wanting to lead the way by embracing innovative technology and new ways of working. This includes integrating automation where possible to free up resources to provide personalised support to customers who need it most.

After successfully working alongside us to develop and implement our award-winning Caseload Manager solution in 2021 to improve arrears management, they wanted to further leverage our product suite to help streamline engagement with their communities. This is where Voicescape Engage came in. 

The Challenge

Driving up customer satisfaction, streamlining processes to save colleague time, and delivering maximum value to tenants continue to be major priorities for Thirteen. Engagement is key here, as they recognised the need to embrace further change and deliver more meaningful, tenant-focused interactions across the communities.

Thirteen identified a number of areas where enhanced approaches to engagement would help them achieve these aims. Whether that be to understand customer demand across their housing stock, streamline the terminations process, or gain more clarity on tenants’ needs and support requirements over damp and mould (DMC) issues. 

DMC cases in particular have seen a significant increase recently. What's more, Thirteen lacked clear insight where they had attempted but failed to gain entry to properties, known as no-access., to identify whether DMC issues had been resolved or customers still needed support. And with the introduction of Awaab’s Law and other relevant new legislation, the need was clear for better contact and regular check-ins during and after works had been carried out. Above all, Thirteen wanted to ensure customers felt supported and listened to throughout the repair process, and utilised Voicescape Engage to enable this. 

The Solution

Voicescape Engage empowers landlords to roll out bespoke campaigns that capture feedback and establish non-transactional engagement in real time. Using existing resources, landlords may substitute resource-intensive outbound calling activity into more focused inbound calls or actionable insights. For Thirteen, Engage was adopted to launch a number of self-serve campaigns that enabled efficient two-way communication and feedback with tenants. This was executed at scale for different types of cases, without the need for additional people resources. 

Automated outbound engagement enabled their team to more effectively identify customers who required contact and/or further support. Facilitating contact in this way and giving the tenant more control, provided their teams with extra capacity for meaningful engagements and useful feedback. Thirteen have since leveraged this solution across a number of campaigns, using dialogue and responses tailored to the particular case.

“By embracing Voicescape’s Engage technology we have utilised the skills of colleagues, to support and spend more time  with customers to provide the best possible outcomes  – through an engagement platform that enables customers to contact us at a time that suits their needs.”

Caroline Harraway, Housing Services Manager at Thirteen Housing Group 

The Results

Using Voicescape Engage for DMC cases, Thirteen saved approximately 20 hours a week on first calls alone. They reduced the need for callbacks by more than 50%, whilst quickly identifying cases where their customers no longer needed assistance. This freed up resources for meaningful interactions with those customers who needed them most. As a result, Thirteen were able to refine and reduce workloads and reach customers much more efficiently. 

Engage also enabled Thirteen to automate key touch points in the termination process, ensuring customers could easily access important information and requirements at a time that suited them around their busy moving schedule. This prompted customers to book in appointments to hand keys back, with automated appointment reminders and a consistent stream of support – without the need for time-consuming manual intervention.

“Engage has proven to be a great solution – in such a short period we've managed to use the technology to deliver greater engagement within our communities. Moving home can be a stressful experience but through using engage we have streamlined our customer contacts and  ensured clear consistent messaging to improve the overall customer experience. What’s more is it has enabled Thirteen to be more effective, saving up to 11 hours a week in colleague time.”

Kay Glew, Director of Operations at Thirteen Housing Group 

The Future

Following their successful utilisation of Voicescape Engage across an initial set of campaigns, Thirteen are eager to develop more engagement options for their tenants, such as the ability to transcribe and respond to voice messages. They also plan to expand Engage across even more use cases and campaigns, including but not limited to silent customers, high-risk tenancies, student engagement, welfare check-ins and failed DDs. 

Voicescape is currently collaborating on a project with Thirteen Group which leverages Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to support this broader range of engagement – yet another example of how Thirteen are embracing innovation to build stronger communities with Voicescape’s support. 

Want to discover how our product suite can help you engage with your communities in more efficient and effective ways? Don’t hesitate to get in touch today.