The pandemic has fast-tracked digitalisation across the sector with 90% accelerating their digital journey in 2020. This year we’ve seen the importance continuing on this digital journey and embracing the opportunities and benefits that digital solutions bring – exploring new innovations to improve systems, services and enhance your customer experience.
The possibilities are endless for what you can do to use digital solutions to make a difference to the lives of your customers, your people, and your business. The most successful organisations look beyond just the implementation of digital solutions, and educate management and staff to understand how to unlock their potential to transform how they operate.
Ahead of our final Digital Futures Club meeting of 2021, we look at three areas where digital solutions can bring benefits to your customers and your business:
Customer service efficiency
Self-service web portals can enable your customers to report repairs efficiently and quickly, so these can be dealt with more promptly. It can also be used to manage rent payments securely online which helps customers to self-manage and be empowered to oversee their account. It can also save money by reducing staff costs or increase capacity to give more time to deal with complex queries and support the most vulnerable residents.
Chatbots are also a great way to help your customers communicate with you and gives them another channel to use. This is particularly beneficial to those residents who perhaps are unable to speak on the phone due to different needs or have a language barrier.
Predictive analytics for better outcomes
Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. The goal is to provide the best assessment of what will happen in the future.
This can be used to help make life easier for social landlords. For instance, you can be informed when a lift is likely to break down by looking at past service reports and combining them with the manufacturer’s requirements such as recommended servicing intervals. This can also be used for other common issues within housing such as boiler failures.
Predictive analytics systems and artificial intelligence (AI) can even identify who is not likely to pay their rent, enabling social housing providers to intervene with assistance before a tenant gets into rent arrears and ultimately helps protect your rental income. However, you need to consider that AI and tech can in fact have some baked in biases (discover more in our blog) and there are some things that can’t be decided with AI alone and need a mix of context, human and machine working together.
Digital solutions to power your frontline
Embracing digital solutions on the frontline can empower your people to do more for residents and streamline tasks that could normally be time consuming. For example, our Photobook inspection app is designed to help social landlords digitalise their inspection process, saving time on completing paperwork and rapidly reducing the admin time spent to consolidate this information.
This increased capacity means more time to focus on what matters most to your organisation and your customers.
Above all, digital innovation can help to streamline services, provide better customer service, save money, and make life easier for you and your customers. There is so much more to discover on digital innovation and how it can be used in social housing.
Find out more at Housemark’s Digital Futures Club which uncovers a range of digital solutions suited to the social housing sector. You’ll get the chance to share best practice with peers in a supportive environment led by a dedicated club manager. The Digital Futures Club provides you with the latest digital developments, so you can be on the pulse of what’s happening and know how to use digital solutions to make a difference.
Our next club event is taking place on Thursday, 4 November and there are still places available! Contact tina.reid@housemark.co.uk for more information.