17th April 2023
Helping tenants find homes, pay rent and report repairs sounds straightforward, right?
Well yes, with the right tenant management solution. But that’s where things get tricky for housing associations. Squeezed on budgets and under pressure to comply with stricter social housing regulations, providers need to tick all the boxes for efficiency, tenant experience and regulatory compliance.
With no wiggle room on budgets, that means doing more with less — putting efficiency firmly in the spotlight. Enter intelligent automation.
Automating manual and repetitive tasks frees up housing staff to focus on their core clients — tenants. By automating processes that support routine tenant interactions, the team can channel its energy on dealing with exceptions and tricky calls (that automation can’t handle). Rather than them all getting stuck in the same queue.
Another plus is meeting tenant demand for more digital self-service. So, rather than relying on manual workarounds and spreadsheets as tenants wait for answers, they receive rapid responses or are routed to the right people from the get-go.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) does this…and more. As a form of intelligent automation, it focuses on automating repetitive and rules-based, on-screen processes. All this, while staff are freed up to handle complex queries — and ensuring reports are easy to access and more accurate.
Here are some great examples of how housing providers can embrace automation with RPA and save time:
Universal Credit claim verification
Housing associations have a responsibility to ensure records are maintained internally and validated with external agencies such as the Department of Work and Pensions. Getting that right is a hugely manual process which is labour intensive e.g. validation of claims in the DWP Universal Credit Portal. RPA speeds up the process, delivers a consistent service and reduces the costs in time and manpower.
Streamlined contact management
Rather than manually keying in changes of address, a bot logs into the CRM from your contact centre, updating the customer record automatically or escalating when needed. It will automatically update customers of the change and can update multiple systems at the same time.
When tenants send emails to the customer care team, they’re often sent on manually to relevant departments to handle the query. With RPA, a bot can read the email, identify its purpose and send it to the correct CRM queue. It can also even perform back-office tasks to complete requests and reply to emails that don’t need human intervention, attaching the correct information.
Finance process automation
Rather than manually reading and handling emails regarding accounts documents and invoices, a bot can open, scan and submit them to the finance system directly. For accounts reconciliation, this can be cross referenced with purchase order numbers then processed for payment (also useful in asset management, finance, HR and contact centres).
Supporting bank reconciliation, bots can identify inconsistencies. RPA automates the matching of bank balances and accounting records, leaving staff to focus on complicated cases.
Housing sector automation is a low-risk approach to a digital-first future. With intelligent automation for housing, you can start small and roll out successes, and scale up as you go. It’s designed to easily integrate with investments in systems already made and be easy to change and adapt to meet future requirements.
Our AI-powered robotic process automation, Liberty RPA, frees-up people from mundane and cumbersome repetitive tasks and enables them to be more productive.
Customer care is at an inflection point: demands are higher and resources are limited. According to a McKinsey survey, organisations’ existing capacities are being challenged by higher call volumes and more complex and challenging enquiries. Employers are also struggling to retain customer care agents, who are being poached by competitors or feeling dissatisfied in their work.
Many organisations, having adopted advanced technologies like automation RPA, low-code and AI, can fall into the trap of using these technologies in isolation, failing to adequately connect them and use them interactively. This obstructs the key benefits of intelligent automation…
Housing providers want their tenants to be safe, healthy and comfortable in their homes. To achieve this, they need to be proactive in managing and maintaining risk across their housing stock. And this includes damp and mould risk management.
Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) aim to improve the lives of social housing tenants — making sure they are listened to, able to live in safe homes in good repair and their complaints are well handled. They form part of a set of ways, laid out by Government to improve things for people living in social housing.
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