Transforming the tenant journey

Cairn Housing Association, and its subsidiary Ancho, are not-for-profit charities that provides quality, affordable homes and services, along with its communities and partners, throughout Scotland. Their mission is to provide landlord services that surpass expectations, whilst making sure tenants feel reassured, supported and connected.

Cairn was faced with tenants’ growing needs to request a service, or make a payment, at a time and using a method convenient to them. This increase in requirements had meant that the Cairn team was tasked with responding to tenants and maintaining a seamless customer experience. To meet this new level of demand, Cairn needed to extend its services beyond telephony to a range of digital channels such as web chat, Facebook Messenger, and its own online portal. And, in a particularly turbulent and uncertain landscape, Cairn needs the ability to make its own software changes, quickly and flexibly as it needed them. It also wanted its tenants to benefit from a seamless journey, from the beginning to the end of every interaction.

Cairn’s primary goal was to ensure that tenants could contact and log an enquiry or service request with a member of the team quickly, across a range of channels, and that as many queries were dealt with as possible at the very first point of contact. However, disconnected back-office systems were holding Cairn back from making this a reality. Customer self-service, for example, was previously a form-based service that lacked end-to-end integration. Any changes Cairn needed were dependent on the product and the vendor roadmap, with changes taking time that the charity simply did not have to waste. As a result, Cairn’s teams used workarounds, which added additional steps and complexity – and often resulted in stages being missed and errors being made.

To overcome this, Cairn implemented Netcall’s Liberty Platform, an all-in-one customer experience suite, that enables businesses to make huge transformational changes, fast.

To provide a seamless end-to-end journey, the digital team developed its own customer management system using Liberty Create, Netcall’s low-code platform, which enables business users to build their own apps and processes with minimal IT intervention. Using the low-code software, Cairn designed and built a new online portal for its tenants called MyCairn. Tenants are now able to pay rent, report repairs or log complaints. Some processes are fully automated while others are followed up during office hours.

By using a low-code solution, the team could limit inefficiencies caused by various overlapping software licenses and systems. Not only did this help to limit any subsequent vulnerabilities associated with application sprawl, but it also allowed tighter control over all processes. Previously, legacy systems struggled to enable automation; however, with Create, data can now flow seamlessly between systems and processes. The simplicity and efficiency of Create has also meant that Cairn can make flexible changes to workflows and build new processes exactly when, where and how the team needs them – at no additional license cost.

In the first four months, the MyCairn portal achieved the following results: