Housing Associations
“Perspicuity have shown us that they really do understand the challenges we face: the sheer volume of information and data that we have to manage and the difficulties of maintaining an accurate and up to date picture of each housing asset or customer case.”
Tariq Mehmood, Strategic Programme Manager, Metropolitan Housing Partnership
Customer service and compliance challenges
Increased competition is driving housing associations to expand rapidly – often through multiple acquisitions. This leads to a number of challenges, particularly in meeting the strict Tenant Services Authority (TSA) guidelines of fair and repeatable customer service through auditable and repeatable processes. There is also the matter of compliance in the storage and management of personal customer data.
If housing associations are to remain competitive and continue to offer high levels of customer service they will need an integrated infrastructure for all content and communication relating to each individual property and customer.
Some typical issues:
- Disparate business systems with limited formal business processes
- Lack of formalised management reporting on business processes
- Large volumes of paper documents still in use: paper forms, maintenance requests, invoices, court correspondence, complaints, immigration and asylum seeker documentation
- High staff turnover – difficult to maintain knowledge of policies and procedures
- Ineffective internal communication
- Compliance: personal records, court case documentation for immigration/asylum seekers
- No central source of all information relating to a home or customer
- Noise disturbance documentation – storage of personal information and trend tracking
Vision for consistent service delivery
The answer is Enterprise Content Management (ECM). An ECM system can give your staff the tools and information they need to do their job properly and achieve high levels of customer service. A consolidated business platform with a single repository for all business information and knowledge gives you a solid foundation from which to grow business. Because there is one single source of all the information on each home or customer, requests can be dealt with quickly and efficiently and records kept of customer interaction.
Visible, automated processes mean that staff can spend their time on real business activity rather than wasting time locating and processing data. Paper-based processes can be nearly eliminated and performance monitoring provides the management information you need to measure performance and make actionable decisions.
Among the benefits are: consistent and reliable service delivery, more timely response to staff and customers, improved compliance and greater productivity.
Roadmap for Enterprise Content Management
Perspicuity are enterprise content management specialists. We work predominantly with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and EMC Documentum systems, but we firmly believe that ECM is about far more than the technology you choose.
Business-wide strategy
For an ECM strategy to work you need a roadmap that takes account of the business issues you want to address and provides a step by step strategy to take you to where you need to be. Too many ECM implementations focus on the needs of individual departments rather than the business as a whole. It is great to start small with quick wins that provide immediate business benefit and get user buy-in, but anything you do must be part of the overall picture that delivers a company-wide ECM system.
Low, fixed cost delivery
We implement the majority of our ECM systems through our P1 approach – a service delivered at a low, fixed monthly cost and that encompasses strategy, development, support and maintenance. The agile delivery model means that your business can change priorities but that your ECM strategy can stay on track.
