Capita - Designs for life

Designs for life of w ie v s ’ r o t c e s g The social housin ay w e h t e g n a h c y all how I T will radic re u t u f e h t in s k r it wo

Capita’s Housing Conference 2013

Designs for life While debate continues over current welfare reforms, social housing organisations are having to adapt very rapidly to their impact. The sector broadly accepts the need to cut costs on welfare spending, but many associations state that the likely result of the changes will be more rent arrears and increased costs of doing business*.

If organisations continue to operate as they have done, this will have a knock on effect in terms of being able to service social housing customers.

Therefore, there is a clear need to make some significant changes to the way social housing organisations work in order to maintain service levels effectively.

However, there is uncertainty about what this change will look like and how these obstacles will be overcome.

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At times like these, it is always good to put heads together and come up with solutions.

Capita’s fifth annual Housing Conference, which had the theme of ‘Back to the Future’, provided one opportunity to do this. It brought together 120 IT directors, managers and team leaders who work supporting social housing teams.

Throughout the conference, a novel approach was employed to recording the hopes, fears and ideas of the delegates. Attendees and speakers alike were asked a series of questions relating to how technology in this sector will develop to help them adapt to the new world.

Artists were on hand to capture their thoughts and feelings visually on a mural.

This paper draws together key ideas from this exercise, bringing the collective problem-solving skills of the sector to bear on the current conundrum. *CASE Report - ‘The impact of welfare reform on housing’

The view from the top Social housing providers are, by nature, dependent on the rent they receive. As many customers are on benefits, the ability for them to pay that rent can be influenced significantly by any welfare reforms.

And the last few years have seen some of the biggest changes to welfare in many years, with the proposal of direct payment of housing benefit, a benefits cap and the underoccupancy changes effectively reducing benefits for some tenants. Social housing providers are trying to evaluate the impact of these reforms while still coping with an unprecedented demand for housing stock in recent times.

The expected outcome of the changes is an increase in rent arrears which will lead to more administrative time chasing debt, a hike in the cost of borrowing to build and maintaining housing stock and a rise in the cost of doing business generally.

Change has been thrust upon the social housing providers and the people they serve, so it was timely to think about how technology can simplify business processes so that the sector can move forward successfully.

At the conference, technology was seen as an enabler, helping organisations become more efficient and meet two core objectives: to improve customer service and cut costs.

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The 3 Key Solutions that delegates focused on were: 1.

Working on the move

2. Engaging with service users 3. The office of the future

Working on the move Social housing providers are very familiar with maintenance staff working with the help of mobile technology; receiving jobs or reporting completed work directly back to base via a smartphone or laptop. Delegates at the conference took this scenario further and discussed the opportunities that could be created if more staff were mobile.

What if, when any staff member was on site in an area of social housing they wore a hivisibility jacket and had the technology and systems to help answer almost any enquiry?

So while a housing officer is conducting an inspection of a property, they could answer another customer’s questions about how their application for a bigger property was progressing or take down details of an anti-social behaviour incident.

Delegates could see the advantages of working on the move both in terms of improving the customer experience and for increasing efficiency. With a connected hand held device – an office on the move – the housing worker will be able to record any queries and action them there and then. This was seen as far more effective than fielding telephone calls at a later date or making notes that had to be typed in when back at the office.

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The practicalities of mobile technology were discussed too. Delegates highlighted the need to have the right technology and to be able to maintain a connection with the office at all times, otherwise any efficiency gains would be lost. 3G and 4G was also discussed and their ability to overcome some of these issues.

Some delegates recommended addressing the social side of mobile working to ensure that workers do not become isolated, as interaction with their fellow workers is reduced.

They suggested getting together with other colleagues on a regular basis to avoid this.

Engaging with service users Moving users online to self-serve, or channel shifting, is something that those in housing are now very accustomed to but the discussions at the conference took this a step beyond web-based services.

One idea floated was not to bother with putting services online but to head straight to developing apps for them and engaging with users via the devices that they want to use – their smartphones and tablets. Straightforward applications for reporting graffiti, booking a repair and paying rent would all be easily transferable to an app and some social housing organisations had already implemented this technology.

There was a general feeling that in the near future the customer should not need to come to the organisation to consume many standard services but that the service should be literally pushed to the service user.

Some examples included the current use of texts to inform a tenant that their rent had gone into arrears. This could be sent directly to their smartphone with a link to download an app to pay the arrears.

No involvement would be required from any housing staff to complete this process and time savings in chasing unpaid rent would be significant. Another example, would be for appointment information to be sent out via text with the facility to enable the customer to accept the appointment or select an alternative one.

A few delegates raised concerns about technology effectively creating a 24/7 environment where customers might expect their problems to be dealt with at any time of day or night.

What was needed, it was felt, was technology that could link systems together to ensure that any report was logged and sent automatically to the repair team without staff involvement, to avoid delays out of hours.

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All delegates were keen to stress that automation was only relevant for the straightforward services that are provided; not everything can go online. The example of John Lewis and Amazon was used to illustrate this. When you have a simple purchase to make you go directly online and buy at Amazon.

When it is slightly more individual or bespoke, you actually want to go to the high street, review the item in John Lewis and then go back to Amazon to buy it and get it delivered to your door.

The social side of social housing provision was never forgotten and the need to keep supporting those who do not or cannot use digital channels. The idea of creating community hubs was seen as one solution to this, enabling providers to serve the needs of those individuals who want face-to-face interactions without the need for expensive office space.

Many delegates also raised the point that the unwillingness of the older population to access newer web and app channels is one that will diminish in time, as today’s web-savvy middle-aged population will eventually become the connected pensioners of the future!

Attendees brainstormed how the new social housing organisations would develop with more technologically-engaged service users. They floated the idea of crowd-sourcing; perhaps using Twitter to recruit volunteers to clean up a park or to raise funding to plant flowers on a communal green space.

There was also talk of linking up with the private sector in various ways – perhaps to ask them to sponsor free Wi-Fi in an area of deprivation and a current example of a private-public sector link-up was covered on the day. One social housing organisation had worked with Experian to develop credit ratings for social housing tenants so they could apply for standard loans rather than resorting to pay-day loans. It was felt that other such link-ups could help develop the role of social housing organisations and potentially fill the gap that reduced rents and funding could create.

The office of the future

‘Offices won’t exist in the future,’ was one delegate’s view. ‘We will all be working from cars,’ was another’s.

It is true that mobile working will fundamentally change an office’s functions, both in terms of the work that takes place there and the physical structure of the environment.

With mobile working, services can be delivered at the coal face which will improve customer service, boost efficiency (as no data is entered twice) and save money on office space. It could also remove the need for centralised call centre staff.

This could realise savings in terms of building stock. Social housing providers could downsize into smaller office spaces to accommodate a more mobile workforce and introduce hot-desking options.

No matter what the technology allows, all delegates were keen to press for some kind of central meeting place to collaborate and share ideas. They wanted to ensure mobile workers did not feel alone.

Delegates discussed how some of the latest technologies would allow them to have a more proactive function, which would help improve service delivery overall and drive efficiency.

For vulnerable service users, sensors in floors or fridges could inform their housing providers if a service user had not moved for a long period of time. This could automatically send details to a mobile worker who could then check on the person concerned. Or a smart reader in a boiler that could ‘call’ home automatically to the maintenance database to request a service as it can judge when it is not working correctly or economically.

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Closer to reality Although many of the ideas covered on the day seemed a long way in the future, many aspects have already been incorporated by some of the social housing organisations who attended the conference as, as the following example shows:

More than bricks and mortar: Delivering remarkable customer service at WDH With 31,000 properties, WDH in Wakefield uses mobile technology to reduce costs and provide a far better service for their customers.

Capita TotalMobile allows WDH employees to use tablets when they are out on site and access all the software and systems they can use in the office.

The reduction in time each officer needs to spend in the office as a result has led to a huge amount of productivity improvements; within a matter of weeks, the Central Debt Team gained between a day to a day and a half per week for each debt officer working in the field.

Mobile technology is also helping the organisation achieve its aim of being paperless; the team’s paper use has been cut to almost nothing from 50,000 pieces of paper a year.

THE RESULTS “As well as the financial advantages of mobile working, it’s a more productive way to work in a way that our customers value. That’s very important to us,” says Geoff Kirk, service director for business systems at the association.

Conclusion Although the social housing sector is undergoing seismic changes at the moment and this was some cause for concern, there was also a great deal of discussion about how this could lead to some exciting new opportunities too.

In fact, one speaker felt that the social housing sector had the opportunity to become the most technologically advanced of all, embracing mobile technology, social media, crowd sourcing, biometrics and the latest energy saving technology all together at once!

Despite all the excitement over the new technology, delegates never lost sight of their wider role in society; ‘we will never be faceless’ was one comment. The overall aim is to look after the property but taking on social responsibility for the person within it was regarded as important too. And some of the ideas around working with an increasingly mobile workforce or in partnership with private organisations could help this become a reality.

What was clear was that this reality is perhaps closer than we think. Examples of social housing organisations, like Wakefield and District Housing, are showing others how a new environment and new pressures are leading to new ideas; ideas that ultimately improve the service for the customer and mean the social side of social housing is always upheld.

Capita is the leading supplier of integrated housing management systems within the social housing sector, with over 240 customers across the UK. As a division of Capita plc, the company has seen strong and consistent growth since its inception in 1994. Capita’s culture is one of developing sophisticated, quality systems to tight legislative timescales to provide products and services that assist its customers in delivering a high performance, customer-centric service.

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