Platform Housing Group manages over 49,000 homes across Derbyshire, the Midlands and as far south as the Cotswolds. Their Mechanical and Electrical (M&E) team is committed to ensuring the provision of warm and safe homes to tenants, investing in colleagues and systems to provide a more effective service for all. Their vision? To achieve 100% gas compliance and positive tenant feedback.
Since 2016, Platform has been leveraging Voicescape’s product suite in multiple ways to maximise its potential, driving more efficient income collection for almost a decade. In this most recent iteration of our partnership, Platform’s M&E team wanted to increase tenants’ engagement and sense of control over their gas and electrical safety appointments. Voicescape Compliance was the ideal solution to help them achieve these goals.
The Challenge
With such a large housing stock and wide range of patches, Platform’s Heating Services team faces a huge task to deliver essential annual servicing and responsive heating repairs. More specifically, they carry out around 40,000 essential gas safety checks per year. Additionally, their EICR Compliance team delivers periodic inspections across the group, totalling 3000 per year.
As well as maintaining safety, health and compliance, Platform’s key aims and objectives include increasing tenant satisfaction and keeping essential compliance visits cost-effective – for both tenants and the organisation. Their previous appointment-booking system made this difficult to maintain, with an over-reliance on letters or texts. When rescheduling was required, tenants had to call off their own accord and wait in a queue to speak to an officer. Naturally, this discouraged some from seeing the process through, which led to widespread access issues and a lack of tenant control over appointments.
Platform needed a faster, more proactive approach to engagement to reduce no-access rates, address the needs of diverse tenants, and streamline the appointment-scheduling process to the benefit and satisfaction of both tenants and staff.
The Solution
According to Platform’s analysis, the cost of a no-access visit was £50 on average, taking into account operatives’ time, fuel, letters, operative callbacks to reschedule, and printing ‘Missed Visit’ cards. They correlated this figure with no-access numbers across their stock, using this data to help build a compelling business case for implementing Voicescape Compliance.
Our implementation team collaborated closely with Platform to ensure a simple setup that would automate the booking, confirming and rescheduling of appointments – removing this once highly manual and costly process, allowing the team to focus on higher value tasks. Once up and running, Voicescape Compliance empowered Platform with automated outbound calls to all tenants that were due appointments for either gas safety checks or EICR inspections. Tenants are presented with a choice to either confirm the prescribed appointment immediately or speak with an advisor to reschedule. In the case that conversation is required, tenants are automatically matched with the best team members via a direct transfer.
Weekly project meetings with our Implementation and Customer Success specialists ensured that the solution was working as intended, solving any queries as well as exploring ways to refine and improve processes along the way. For example, we helped the team by integrating text notifications that allow tenants to confirm or reschedule appointments by replying "YES", providing real-time updates. We also helped them set up dedicated call queues for Voicescape, bypassing IVR and reducing wait times.
“Voicescape Compliance has helped Platform Housing reduce no-access rates and improve tenant satisfaction by streamlining appointment scheduling and giving tenants greater control. This efficient solution supports their commitment to safe, compliant homes while reducing costs and enhancing service delivery.”
Philip Trickett, Heating Services Delivery Manager & EICR Delivery at Platform Housing Group
The Results
Voicescape Compliance has empowered Platform’s M&E team to tackle their challenges head-on – handing their tenants more control and ownership over their appointments, reducing call queues to ensure more successful rescheduling, and reducing no-access rates.
Since launching Voicescape Compliance for gas servicing in 2021, Platform reduced no-access rates from 31% to a low of 17% – with 100% compliance. They launched the solution for EICR inspections in May 2023, and have since reduced no-access rates from 41% to a low of 18%. Overall the tenant response rate to the new automated system was 95%, with a 96.4% satisfaction rate. Direct tenant feedback highlights included: "It feels good to be heard" and "I can make appointments to suit me and my family".
Voicescape Compliance has helped propel proactivity within Platform’s M&E team too, with positive feedback including: "It has created a much more positive workplace" and "It helps those needing more support confirm or change appointments – no need to find contact numbers or wait in massive queues".
Platform also uses Voicescape Compliance to manage their General Repairs and since April 2024, they've had a 92% response rate out of 65,000 successfully connected calls to confirm their appointments, which has massively helped no-access rates and improved communications with their tenants.
“Within the first six months of using Voicescape, the reduction of no-access resulted in it paying for itself. It potentially would have been sooner if we’d added the additional housing team costs.”
Philip Trickett, Heating Services Delivery Manager & EICR Delivery at Platform Housing Group
The Future
Voicescape Compliance has become central to Platform’s operations, and they plan to keep it as a core component moving forward, in tandem with the rest of our product suite, to drive more efficiencies and greater tenant engagement across their processes. They have already leveraged Voicescape technology further to automate the booking process for general and responsive repairs, and plan to apply the solution to more compliance functions. Open dialogue and regular collaboration with Platform means we can address new challenges and opportunities quickly – adapting our technology to help them connect with their communities to the benefit of all.
Book a demo with us today to see how Voicescape Compliance can help you drive down no-access rates.
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