Digital housing service excellence

Leader hampered by legacy tech

A leading provider and developer of affordable homes, BPHA offers renting, retirement living and shared ownership properties in the Oxford and Cambridge area of the UK. With 500-plus staff, it owns or manages 19,500 homes — reinvesting its profits back into new developments that improve opportunities, independence and quality of life for residents while benefiting the wider community.

The BPHA customer communication centre team deals with a wide range of issues: from property repairs to tenancy-related matters such as money advice, rent payments, complaints and security concerns.

However, advisors suffered from a poor experience and were restricted to phone and email communications due to unreliable on-premises systems. They also lacked job variety and meaningful insights from their reporting tools.

“We had been thinking about digital channels and taking our contact centre to the cloud for a while,” said Lianne Martindale, Communications Centre Manager at BPHA. “The need to support hybrid working reinforced that decision, while assisting our environmental goals by reducing the carbon footprint associated with legacy IT systems and employee commuting.”

Categorically the right cloud solution

Adhering to a strict procurement process, BPHA scored the Genesys Cloud^™ platform highest in many categories, including ease of use, reporting capabilities and value for money.

“Genesys seemed to have everything covered, while competitor offerings had gaps,” said Gill Miller, Project Manager, Corporate Change at BPHA. “Rather than being driven by one department, we wanted a solution that could extend to other parts of the business. Thanks to a fantastic Genesys Professional Services and cross-functional BPHA team, we remotely migrated over to the new platform during lockdown. It’s often held up as a gold standard project.”

Better convenience, greater choice, happier customers

Genesys currently supports around 70 concurrent users in the BPHA contact centre, IT help desk and maintenance scheduling functions, with complaint handlers due to be onboarded soon. They’re now able to effortlessly switch between phone, email, web messaging, WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook conversations — efficiently managed from a single desktop.

“We handle around 10,500 phone, WhatsApp and Genesys Web Messaging interactions a month,” said Martindale. “The async nature of Genesys Web Messaging enables a website visitor to interact with a bot or advisor and return later to pick up again. Customers are no longer tied to their phones and appreciate the convenience. They’re also able to attach informative photos of their property issues, for example.”

Other queue-busting innovations include the ability to offer callbacks and a virtual assistant. “Introducing a chatbot that was built with Genesys Bot Flows allowed us to extend service cost effectively,” added Martindale. “Customers can use it 24/7 to get information for FAQs such as making payments, reporting incidents and repairs, and getting assistance with rent. And they still have the option to transfer to a live agent to continue the conversation with the full history.”

Along with greater choice, customers benefit from reduced waiting time and faster answers. Advisors also enjoy a better experience with less frustration and increased work variety as they move between calls, emails and social contacts. Their productivity has been further boosted by Email Ninja, an AppFoundry^® Marketplace solution that simplifies the queuing and surfacing of email requests.

Enhanced engagement and analytics tools

In addition, BPHA took advantage of more embedded Genesys capabilities and retired its previous workforce management solution.

“Once Genesys Cloud had been running for a while, and we’d built-up sufficient data, we started using Genesys Workforce Engagement Management,” said Miller. “Having an all-in-one system is so much easier. For example, if you need to locate a call recording or produce an accurate six-week forecast, it’s quickly accessible.”

Many processes such as quality assurance (QA) have been largely automated. “Monitoring employee performance across even more channels seemed daunting at first,” said Martindale. “However, our QA lead is now able to create evaluation forms and deliver effective coaching at just the right moment, giving valuable praise and feedback.”

Genesys speech and text analytics enables BPHA to dig deeper into phone conversations to track customer sentiment and spot emerging topics — in turn keeping knowledge articles and website content up to date. “Although we’re not there yet, sentiment analysis could proactively head off complaints with a timely phone call from a manager,” concluded Martindale.

Future plans include integrating Genesys with Microsoft Teams collaboration tools and experimenting with WhatsApp video calls.