Uprate your Tenant Complaints Process

Automated transcript for Uprate your Tenant Complaints Process Webinar

00:00:13:20 – 00:00:44:02

Speaker 1

So, I am delighted and very privileged to be able to introduce Neil Templin, digital Services Manager for Paris to Coast today, alongside Louise DAVIES, application analyst. They have had an amazing journey in their transformation process. During 2021 22, and we have cajoled them into speaking with us because we think that they have something very special to share with everyone.

00:00:45:15 – 00:01:03:17

Speaker 1

If you could possibly popular, just some housekeeping, if you could just pop your questions into the chats. We’ll keep the questions flowing. And then at the end, I will pick up with both the speakers and we will cover them. So, Louise, are you happy to start the presentation?

00:01:04:05 – 00:01:04:28

Speaker 2

Yes, no problem.

00:01:05:22 – 00:01:10:25

Speaker 1

Thank you very much. So, thank you to our speakers and we look forward to a great session.

00:01:12:25 – 00:01:50:13

Speaker 3

Okay. Okay. So absolutely. I was a lovely introduction. So yeah, we’re going to loosely share a little bit of learning from building a complaints case type in in Lipsey creates this is more or less the first sort of thing that we’ve built end to end in low code. So, lots of learnings part of that process and some really good outcomes as well.

00:01:51:08 – 00:02:14:14

Speaker 3

Next slide, please. Group Yes, just a quick introduction, so I yield something on Digital Services Manager at East Coast. I look after our applications and development team. I’ve worked in social housing for in various technology roles for about 20 years, which makes me feel ancient when I say that out loud. Live at United You a quick introduction of yourself.

00:02:15:09 – 00:02:31:08

Speaker 2

Yep. I’m Louise Davis, application analyst for East Coast, the I.T. Development Team. I’ve been with them for about two years now. I was pretty green when I started having worked in housing before and I’m background is more travel tech. So, this has been a great experience. So far.

00:02:32:08 – 00:03:01:03

Speaker 3

Plus. So, what I’m going to do is so we’ll talk about the complaints case type but actually I just want to give a bit context first. But because of who we are as an organization and the way it would be. So next slide, please. So yeah, obviously this is a coastal social organization based in Bridgend. We only got properties in Bridgend to where I think we’re anchored to that community in a quite nice way.

00:03:01:29 – 00:03:39:08

Speaker 3

We were the first stop transfer in Wales as well, so which was I think approximately 15 years ago. So, we got about 6000 homes, approximately 6800 customers and we are sorry. Next slide, please. Yes. And so, this is the this is the shape of our team at the moment. So, we’ve got full application on his post. So, these are technical posts mostly concerned with configuring applications, writing integration, doing a little bit school as well.

00:03:40:21 – 00:04:06:14

Speaker 3

And then we’ve got one business analyst that we added to the team about a year ago to kind of help us sort of get requirements from bits of the organization for things that we’re building, I should say, in terms of the work we’re talking about today, it’s really only Louise and our colleague Howard, whose offices are based there is a sort of minimum viable low code teams.

00:04:06:14 – 00:04:25:26

Speaker 3

So, we’ve we took the approach because we weren’t really sure. There’s always a question about what you buy. This is what built and then sort of the spirit of trying to be agile. We thought, right, we’ll start with the sort of the minimum viable team and we’ll start building things and we’ll kind of fuel this process out and see how it works.

00:04:26:03 – 00:04:56:23

Speaker 3

So, everything we did talk about today more or less just involves these two colleagues on the old chart here. Next slide, please. Look, so just to briefly touch on our systems, I’m sure anybody who works in social housing, these won’t come as all that much of a surprise because we’ve all got mostly the same sorts of things. And I think the only thing that is slightly unique to our context is that a lot of these systems represented here are individual systems.

00:04:56:23 – 00:05:33:14

Speaker 3

So, the organisation kind of made the choice to go for what best to bring depending on functionality, which is kind of led to different teams opting for slightly different systems rather than going for whole systems or monolithic systems. And I think some of the suppliers we’ve been working with as well, the way that their products have developed is that by virtue of mergers and acquisitions, rather than architecting a singular system from scratch, you have to have all the functionality and it’s been more of a patchwork systems that they’ve acquired and then worked to integrate to get.

00:05:33:14 – 00:06:08:25

Speaker 3

But I think that’s sort of presented some challenges which are good such a little bit in terms of why we’re waiting for low code. Hop onto the next slide, please. So I was recently doing a bit work on mapping our data entities and data flows between these systems. I just want to get appreciate this slightly so you can’t read the text, but really it was just articulate how the data flows between all those systems and some of the challenges that we’ve got in terms of taking that complexity.

00:06:09:23 – 00:06:38:02

Speaker 3

So that’s definitely one of the driving forces for what is a mechanism that we could bring in to help bring this together and help colleagues provide more cohesive experience, colleagues and customers as well, doing that service delivery. Next slide. Please do. So yeah, in terms of what would make for low code, as I say, it was mechanism to join our systems up and provide a singular view of information in one place.

00:06:38:17 – 00:07:01:12

Speaker 3

I think our team on the Customer Services Centre, that’s sort of the canary in the coal mine in terms of understanding where the friction points are, because they sit in the centre of the organization and kind of the interface between internal colleagues and customers. Often what they’ll say is, Oh, I’ve got to jump around an awful lot of systems to do my tasks.

00:07:01:12 – 00:07:20:14

Speaker 3

And so that’s this is why we are one of the reasons we looked at that one of the first things we did with Craig was to bring the case management system move and then by virtue of the integration, bring the surface all the information they need to the regular basis in one place to cut down all that logging into different systems to find various things.

00:07:21:19 – 00:07:51:18

Speaker 3

The other reason we update for one of the other reasons, the optical locator is to plug functionality gaps. So, whilst I think customers off the shelf systems are great, sometimes they don’t always address all user needs. Typically, we can tell when that’s happening because of a proliferation of spreadsheets around systems where people are putting things throughout the systems in order to manipulate it or do something with it, because the system is kind of getting in the way.

00:07:52:03 – 00:08:20:21

Speaker 3

And so that was definitely one of the areas of perhaps, you know, if this system hasn’t got this functionality, perhaps we could build it around the system to support it. Workflow is something we were really lacking as well. We had workflow within systems, but nothing that would consistently bridge gaps between teams, which obviously, you know, they can cause problems in terms of service delivery, where the service spans multiple teams and then you get those friction points in between.

00:08:22:03 – 00:08:44:14

Speaker 3

And the other thing we wanted to do with Low-Code was bring some capability back in-house in terms of delivering change. So, over many years, working with Steve was players. You gave a company really brilliant relationships, but sometimes you can get stuck with the evolution of a third party and what their roadmap looks like and how quickly they can respond to the change you require.

00:08:45:10 – 00:09:12:12

Speaker 3

And so, we really wanted to bring that capability back in-house so that we were able to respond to emerging business needs and use a sort of agile approach so that we could deliver things more quickly and respond here where we could evidence that there was a gap in the user need. We could design something around that using it and hopefully get much better outcomes, which we’ll talk a little bit back in a minute.

00:09:12:12 – 00:09:39:25

Speaker 3

Next slide. Please do. Okay. So, I’m going to talk a bit about the complaints, the complaints case type that we built because I think it’s quite a good sort of end to end examination of how this worked in practice for us and what we learned. So, in 2021, the Ombudsman for Wales announced that there will be a new standard for Welsh housing associations to adhere to, driven by the Complete Standards authority.

00:09:40:08 – 00:10:04:07

Speaker 3

So, and the aim of that was supporting a more effective complaint handling by giving organizations a set of guidelines to adhere to. As part of that, we also collect and publish complaints data so we submit data to them and they publish it publicly. And I suppose, you know, two reasons for that. Number one, they can evidence that over time complaints handling is getting better in the public sector.

00:10:04:18 – 00:10:41:10

Speaker 3

But also, I think transparency is good for us as organizations in terms of making we were able to benchmark ourselves against others and to see how we’re doing. I think a really interesting approach here was that the Ombudsman expressed the desire for before the reporting requirements went live and they were quite happy to take our data in whatever format we had to in that point in time and iterate on the I suppose that was partially a way to help us kind of move towards where we needed to be and so get some feedback from the Ombudsman in terms of the data we that we were submitting.

00:10:41:23 – 00:11:10:10

Speaker 3

But I think also they were genuinely having not had any data submitted from this. They wanted to kind of see what the lay of the land was as well and whether the reporting requirements were correct. So, I think it was an approach that really lent itself to a more agile development approach and I think we definitely benefited from that and it required quite a big change of internal process and certainly in terms of how we report on complaints previously.

00:11:10:10 – 00:11:37:15

Speaker 3

So, we did have something in place, but it was there was quite a gap between where we were and where we needed to be. But as I say, it represents the ideal opportunity to move our complaints process into a low code platform. So, you say we were already using it for basic case management and this was a great opportunity to build something in Agile way and respond to those requirements from the Ombudsman.

00:11:38:03 – 00:12:23:22

Speaker 3

Next slide. Please leave. Okay. So yeah, as I say, we did have a pre-existing complaints process in place, so it was being managed in a put in risk product which kind of covered some of our needs, but not all of them. It was very limited workflow in terms of what was built into the systems. It mostly quite sorry, relied on emailing various colleagues to call attention to do things, to move the complaints forward and quite difficult to assign complaints to other colleagues, and especially if it involved multiple colleagues that sort of workflow of pass it around is quite difficult.

00:12:25:15 – 00:12:48:20

Speaker 3

There was not a really good way of getting an audit trail of the of a case, you know, so very difficult to see the chronology of where it came in, what happened, what how has it been resolved, you know, sort of case history in terms of the complaints, the data itself. It was quite fragmented as well because of that fact that there was no audit trail.

00:12:49:00 – 00:13:11:06

Speaker 3

It was quite difficult to get a sort of if you wanted to take a forensic view of what happened with a particular case, really quite difficult to gather back and reporting was generally quite difficult as well. So, in order to get what we needed out of the VAT system at the time, we had to extract it out into a fairly basic form out belief, something like a CSP.

00:13:11:06 – 00:13:31:23

Speaker 3

And then there was an awful lot of data manipulation needs to happen to get it into the format that we needed in order for it to be actionable by management. Okay, so on what I’ll do now is to hand over to Louise, who did all the hard work and built the system. So, she’s definitely best placed to talk you through that experience.

00:13:31:23 – 00:13:33:03

Speaker 3

So over to you.

00:13:33:26 – 00:13:57:10

Speaker 2

Yeah. Thanks, Neal. So, I’m just going to cover how this case management system came about and so as you can see, we wanted to avoid reinventing the wheel. So, we worked very closely with Netcall and Clyde Valley Housing, who were based in Scotland. They developed their own sort of complete system and were willing to share their version of that.

00:13:57:10 – 00:14:24:25

Speaker 2

So that template was a real good, solid foundation for us to develop our own system that met our specific requirements and the current iteration of the application, which you’ll see in a pre-recorded video later on, is a lot more reflective of how we worked as an organization. And the reason we took the template from Clyde Valley was because of the time sensitivity given by the Ombudsman.

00:14:25:24 – 00:14:53:04

Speaker 2

So, we didn’t have to too long to get this sorted out. So, it was a great a great option to take. And with building the system, we generally try and work as a team in a sort of agile manner and we thought it was really important to work directly with the colleagues. So, we’ll be affected by the system when it comes into place because of the sort of our drug approach.

00:14:53:04 – 00:15:19:00

Speaker 2

It’s far quicker and easier to make changes. As you said, it was important to have someone in-house to do it as well, so we weren’t reliant on a third party all of the time. And in terms of new features or very quick changes were to make it, but it was very quick to identify those and get those quick wins in and address the bigger issues and the bigger feature changes at a later point.

00:15:19:18 – 00:16:02:01

Speaker 2

So, it was easier to come up with a sort of a minimal viable project to go to go live with. And what we have found most importantly is, as Neil sort of touched upon before, colleagues said, a bit of sort of an apathy towards systems. So, getting them engaged and involved with the requirements definitely improved the sort of culture change towards a new system being implemented as part of the build required an important of historical complaint data and again, as Neil touched upon the previous system was okay, but it wasn’t fit for purpose.

00:16:02:01 – 00:16:38:00

Speaker 2

So as a result of that, a lot of people sort of went off and exported the data for whatever reason were managing things in spreadsheets and different areas. So, as you can imagine, the standardization of the data was really inconsistent and prone to human error. So, it’s taken us quite a long time to get that cleaned up. And as a result, the effect of the complete reporting that we had implemented and this took a lot of work to get that tweaked and as we want it right now.

00:16:38:00 – 00:17:08:16

Speaker 2

So, I’m just going to show you a pre-recorded video of the system actually looks like the save any issues with the live showing. So, it’s just going to cover off how we create a complaint, the processes for a stage one and a stage two view in the sort of a brief view of the back end. So, in the live decree itself and the key thing as well that we have to what we’ve been working on, this is the report.

00:17:08:16 – 00:17:43:27

Speaker 2

And so, if you bear with me, I’ll just bring the video across. Hopefully everyone can see it. So, I’m just going to talk over the video pause. And so, it’s just a cover of each section, a step forward. Okay. So, any person in our organisation can raise a complaint if a tenant or a councillor or a carer of a tenant or a friend of a tenant, a neighbour has indicated they’re not happy with something to anyone.

00:17:43:27 – 00:18:18:00

Speaker 2

It’s not just our customer service team. They would be obligated to log into the system and raise it as a complaint. So how they would do that, everyone’s got access to the system. They’d find the person on the phone, the system, and then just open up their account. And once that account is open, excuse me, once their account is open, this page just gives you a whole sort of overview of any issues or any sort of warnings against that tenant, etc..

00:18:18:24 – 00:18:43:01

Speaker 2

There’s also a list of cases they may have raised in the past. So, you get a nice sort of holistic view of any issues or it’s not just complaint case type we’ve got on this system. There are the case types as well, so each colleague can have a nice overview of any sort of audit history, if you will, to raise the complaint.

00:18:43:19 – 00:19:06:01

Speaker 2

You click a new service request. And as I said, this is the build environment. Not all of these are live yet and the data is doubly data. And then you click the complaint case type. And what this does, then it prompts a form to open in this form our customer service team just double check the details and how they want to be contacted was quite important.

00:19:06:01 – 00:19:33:27

Speaker 2

Now from the Ombudsman requirements. On the next page you submit all the details of the complaint itself. So, who’s reported it? Usually this is this is a tenant for those are the different types we’ve got on the system at the moment. Obviously you can add to this on how it was reported. So, email, telephone letters, if they’ve come in, what it’s in relation to.

00:19:33:27 – 00:20:08:28

Speaker 2

So, we’ve got several, many the categories for complaint and again this is customizable and that will suit your sort of organization. The only difference being is there’s a subcategory for a repair case type because as you can imagine this just a general repair issue doesn’t give much information. So, we’ve added all those in separately as well. But just for this example, we go with something straightforward, so cross-cutting and all this information will pull into the case.

00:20:09:20 – 00:20:42:17

Speaker 2

So, anybody who’s got access to the system can log in, see that and submit that, and then your complaints created and you open the case. So, the next stage we’re going to look at now is how an agents complaint handler resolves a complaint and the different stages. So, this is the first thing you will see when the complaint is raised.

00:20:42:17 – 00:21:05:12

Speaker 2

As I said earlier, everything is pulled in. So, the person who raised the complaint more often than not, if it’s a small sort of grumbling sort of issue or a first point of contact about an issue, which is what a stage one would cover, a customer service team or someone who is talking to the tenant may be able to resolve it there.

00:21:05:12 – 00:21:34:05

Speaker 2

And then they just make a couple of notes on that and close it off the same day. And if that’s the case and it’s not resolved, then what the individual will do is assign it to a complaint lead. So, they’d assign it to a team or an individual who they know would manage this sort of issue. So, they complete that stage.

00:21:35:11 – 00:21:58:20

Speaker 2

And what that does, then it fires off an email to the individual, which will show an example of now what it’s recorded in the case management system. So, this is an automated email with all the details of being recorded. They then prompted at the bottom of the email to log into Case Library to deal with the complaint that’s been assigned to them.

00:21:59:02 – 00:22:21:11

Speaker 2

And there’s also sort of a bit of information of when they’ve got to close it by. So, a stage one case has about ten working days. They need to resolve it by. So that’s calculated and pulled into the email just to make it a bit easier for the individual. So, the individual would log in and they’d review it.

00:22:22:23 – 00:22:56:18

Speaker 2

They’ve got an option whether or not to accept the complaint. More often than not, they do. The reason they may not accept it is because it just been assigned to the wrong personal team, so they reassign that across. But in this case we’ll just accept it. Again, this is sort of the stage three resolves stage. So, this is where they’d make their investigation and or come up with some agreements with the tenant to see how they can resolve the case.

00:22:56:18 – 00:23:22:18

Speaker 2

Another two options at this stage so you can escalate or resolve a case. A stage one has two ways of being escalated to a stage two one, the complaint handler themselves escalate it, or if nothing is being done on the case and it’s gone past ten working days, the system will automatically escalate the case to a stage two.

00:23:22:18 – 00:23:46:03

Speaker 2

And that’s something we’ve recently implemented. So, it’s to stop any stagnation with cases and the stops go in of any sort of reporting data. So that’s an automatic reason that that can also happen if it’s stuck at an acceptance stage. So, if it’s been emailed to someone and they haven’t even accepted the complaint, they will get moved on to a stage two.

00:23:46:03 – 00:24:32:01

Speaker 2

So, in this instance, we’ll just resolve the case. At this point there are only two resolutions. Was the complaint upheld and upheld? If it is upheld, we’ve recently introduced a compensation recording. Now this recent requirement that previously we weren’t really recording this anyway, so that’s pulled into the reporting page as well. So, in this instance we just say, know that you record what sort of action was taken to resolve this complaint, and that’s the end of the end of the stage one case and stage two is very similar.

00:24:32:17 – 00:25:24:13

Speaker 2

So, this example is an escalation there. Bear with me. Sorry. As you scroll in up, it’s not resolved. It’s been reassigned and now the case is escalated to a different individual. Again, it’s quite similar. The only difference with the stage two is that you can’t extend it. The reason for extensions is if there’s a job waiting to be completed on a on a complaint and perhaps the tenant wants to wait until that’s done, until they’re completely satisfied that the complaint is resolved, the individual, when you click extend, it, will ask you to put in a date and across the left-hand side.

00:25:24:13 – 00:25:32:06

Speaker 2

Once you complete that, it will update the case due date to show you that.

00:25:32:23 – 00:25:33:06

Speaker 3

Or.

00:25:33:28 – 00:26:01:01

Speaker 2

For now. And then what they do is they update the customer with that information and the reason why at the moment that is manual. What we want to introduce in future is the sort of automation of templates. So, we need to create the templates from within the case management system and that saves to the documents tab. As you can see along the top, the next two messages.

00:26:01:13 – 00:26:31:17

Speaker 2

And so, this just encourages then a standardization with, with some customization for handlers to input to, to send off to customers so they don’t have to go outside of the system to create the letters to send off to two tenants or the complainant. And then everything would be recorded. Any notes, any sort of contact is recorded by the hundreds saved in this area.

00:26:31:17 – 00:27:04:27

Speaker 2

And as I said, any documents can be uploaded at anything historic. And obviously in future if we get the templates set up, which is our plan, they will be saved here as well. You can also send emails from within. So, the case management system, again, this is completely customisable, like all we have at the moment is just to send a blunt message to the complainant again, it’s to save users having to dip in and out of separate systems.

00:27:04:27 – 00:27:26:29

Speaker 2

And we know a lot of our colleagues uses have and can be inundated with emails with different reasons. So again, it’s just to keep the keep everything in one place for them, just to make life a little bit easier. And again, you can add attachments and anything to this for this email. So again, it’s all set up in the background however you want it.

00:27:28:13 – 00:27:55:15

Speaker 2

Another recent feature we introduced because this was an issue previously in Old Systems, is that we’ve have a reassign case. So, if you’re along so far in the process, there is a regression option within Liberty create. But we found it caused problems with our reporting information. Again, it would skew data. So, we introduced this new feature called Reassign Case.

00:27:56:03 – 00:28:27:13

Speaker 2

You could just reassign it to whoever needs it. Just add a reason why that not saved in the in the note section as well on the cross. The history of the of the process as well. As you can see, there’s two sort of small clocks next to each field. So again, it’s just to give an audit of what’s happened of that particular field.

00:28:27:13 – 00:28:55:19

Speaker 2

You can see a couple of these in the process and so on. So, we’ll just resolve the stage two. Again, it’s a bit similar to stage one, if upheld or not upheld, what action was taken? The only difference is we need to record and show what lessons were learned from this particular case just to see obviously if there’s any patterns.

00:28:55:19 – 00:29:36:13

Speaker 2

So, I want just keep that straightforward for now for the example and again, as I mentioned earlier, we would like to get the templates introduced and this is where they would show in draft response and earlier in the stage where you’re acknowledging the complaint, which is a requirement for stage two. So, for now, colleagues, and you just do it manually.

00:29:36:13 – 00:30:07:15

Speaker 2

Okay. So, the next section we look at is again, just a bit of the background of the process of how everything is sort of it’s a very brief overview of how things are built on considering other updates and what we’ve done with the complaints reporting page as well. So, this is our complaint process. Mark So this is specific for the complaint case type and every case type you would build in Liberty Create would have this process map.

00:30:08:03 – 00:30:37:03

Speaker 2

Again, we did take this from Clyde Valley since April this has changed dramatically and there’s certain areas we don’t quite use yet, but we will we are considering using in the future. So, every case as we saw earlier, starts on the Rhys complaint once the form is completed. So, everything from that from that element onwards is what you’ve seen in the sort of frontend parts of it.

00:30:38:20 – 00:31:07:12

Speaker 2

And as I talked about earlier, a recent feature that we’ve introduced is the escalation, which has been quite a big hit amongst our colleagues and users. So, the stuff just moves along and doesn’t stagnate anywhere in the process. And this is from this point as well with the process map is where you build your pages is where you set up your rules, timers and all that sort of part of it.

00:31:08:03 – 00:31:10:19

Speaker 2

So, I’ll just skip forward a.

00:31:10:19 – 00:31:11:08

Speaker 3

Little more.

00:31:16:20 – 00:31:41:06

Speaker 2

And then what you want you can use this is the report complaints reporting page. So, we’ve built I’ll show you the other part in a few moments. But again, this is a recent feature we’ve introduced so you can add a widget, which is the process map. And this is more for, you know, for the managers, supervisors. For now, it’s only showing to me as the build-up and because I want to tweak it a bit more.

00:31:41:17 – 00:32:11:13

Speaker 2

But as you can see, well, this will show you is a sort of a visual of how long everything sort of takes roughly again, so you can identify pain points. So, the process is a rule stopping something and it could just help you just make things perhaps flow a bit better for whatever reason. Again, this is the build system, so it’s not life statistics, but yeah, so everything’s all lovely and green for now.

00:32:11:13 – 00:32:39:11

Speaker 2

Yeah. So, it gives you sort of the average duration and how long sort of a case stays in our area for. So, I think that’s quite helpful to know. We’ll skip on a little bit more. So yeah, again, we’re just going to move on to reporting the data tables that we’ve got. So, when you hit the report in time, this is the first thing you’ll see all these again, this has all been set up purely for our requirements.

00:32:39:11 – 00:33:16:15

Speaker 2

Somewhat. The Ombudsman, if asked for, is broken down into an overall summary of the complaints or stage one and stage two, and these particular, as you can see, the blue sort of numbers and the wording, those are links. When you hit that sort of link, the page will refresh and update the entire page with that particular filter. So, for example, you may just want to look at all active cases and then you can add in again more.

00:33:16:16 – 00:33:40:06

Speaker 2

Any sort of the process in the background is very customizable for how you want to present stuff. So, this is just nice visual bar graphs for stage one and stage two complaints. You can add on a download sort of button if you want to, to export those out as well. Gives you a breakdown of the categories and the most popular resolutions for up to go case type.

00:33:40:20 – 00:34:01:16

Speaker 2

And at the bottom, which is the big one we use is the data table. So, as you can see, I click the active filter at the top and now I will only see cases with the status of active. And again, this entire table is customizable so you can pop whatever you want into this. That seemed to organisation’s needs.

00:34:02:02 – 00:34:29:09

Speaker 2

And again, we’ve got this as a download CSS3 so people can export out specifics if they want to manipulate a few more things outside of it. But everything captured in here and then we skip on to slightly like I said earlier, you can reset it and again, just cool, very grill down even more and stage one of stage two.

00:34:30:27 – 00:34:53:26

Speaker 2

As I said earlier, that form captures a lot of data. So as long as you’re capturing the data, you can put whatever you want in this complaint reported. So how we receive it, how we received a complaint and who was reporting it. And as I mentioned earlier, the new feature we’ve introduced is the compensation paid as well. Again, we’ve got the export in as a CSP for users for whatever reporting they may need a report.

00:34:53:27 – 00:35:32:05

Speaker 2

And generally, we tend to report to the Ombudsman on a quarterly basis and businesses board on a monthly basis. So, this has been a big, big job for us to make sure everything is accurate and nothing is skewed and I think that covers everything for this page covered the bar graphs earlier and again, another sort of nice little feature we introduced was a search option for the data table, because previously there were numbered sort of times at the bottom of the table and you’d have to go through each one to find a particular case.

00:35:32:05 – 00:36:04:29

Speaker 2

So now again, just making user lives just a little bit easier and you can order that for how you will. So, this is ordered in and a sort of contained sort of format, I think is the video. Yep. I’ll just come back to the presentation again. Hopefully you can all see that. Okay. With me. Sorry, that was the wrong video.

00:36:06:20 – 00:36:41:10

Speaker 2

So, we went live in April 2022 and moreover, we’ve done since then. So, as I’ve shown in the in that demo, that’s the current iteration in a very sort of brief overview of what it does. And a lot of those changes have come since April 2022. Of what we’ve ensured we do is that we do regular small rollouts and I’ve introduced sort of patch notes for users just to show them what it was before, what it is now and why we changed it.

00:36:41:23 – 00:37:14:01

Speaker 2

And this is more often than not driven by the colleagues themselves. As I said earlier, it was really important for buy in that colleagues are involved heavily in to how they want it, as long as it makes sense. People are considering the teams and how it might affect other teams, not just their own teams. So that’s something we focused on as well, just to draw people out of the work in silos because it is very easy just to think about what your team needs rather than the wider organization.

00:37:14:01 – 00:37:43:02

Speaker 2

And I will just cover off a couple of stats. So, pre-case management system, as Neil touched upon earlier, the previous system we used to record complaints wasn’t really fit for purpose and we worked out a rough average that there was a completion of 63 working days, which as you can imagine wasn’t great. But each complaint at that time, stage one or stage two didn’t exist.

00:37:43:02 – 00:38:14:29

Speaker 2

So, this was just an amalgamation of everything. And as we said, that system we use was really fit for purpose. So, this statistic isn’t really surprising since the implementation of the case management system. As you can see, there’s a massive turnaround with the average time to completion. So, stage one, it’s full and as you can see, these tools have dropped them up dramatically and the total average is a lot is a lot lower.

00:38:14:29 – 00:38:42:08

Speaker 2

So, we can see just looking at the stats alone, how great the turnaround has been, not only just pure statistics, but we’ve recently had an internal audit and it was really, really complimentary around the policy, around the system. And we’ve only had one recommendation as part of the case workflow, which is what I talked about earlier with the letter templates.

00:38:42:08 – 00:39:16:19

Speaker 2

So that’s something we’re going to look into now and look to implement in in the coming months. And we just wanted to share some user feedback as well. So, as you can see, it’s really positive, really engaging. And as I mentioned earlier, I think users are happy because we’ve got internal people making these changes as well. And we just wanted to share some of the top tips and lessons learned throughout this entire process.

00:39:16:19 – 00:39:47:12

Speaker 2

So, a key thing I know I try not to do is using sort of tech jargon with non-technical individuals. If I was to tell them, oh yeah, I’ll see if I can fit that into my sprint, I don’t think that we understand what that means unless they have a sort of crash course for Agile words. I’ve covered it quite a lot in this presentation, but use user uses the end of the day myself or my colleague to test this.

00:39:47:12 – 00:40:10:06

Speaker 2

So, we’re blue in the face, but we’re not using it day to day. So, it makes sense to get that by and get that engagement with your colleagues who will be using it and allow them to solution. I use the system to try not to give them solutions, even though it can be tempting. Sometimes we do this a lot by using various methods.

00:40:10:06 – 00:40:39:05

Speaker 2

I think a popular one has been a problem definition document, so we identify the problem of and give a couple of options and allow our colleagues then to give options themselves. And then we work through the sort of best option, the solution. And then again, we’ve crossed it out. But learning is good. That’s a big thing I’ve learned with this system and that call it.

00:40:39:05 – 00:41:14:23

Speaker 2

We really support live because I think people hear the word low code and they think that equates to that. It’s easy is it is a huge learning curve, but it’s really is so pliable and customizable once, once you get going. And Netcall has been really helpful with doing specifics for us that we need for our system. And yeah, thank you for listening because any questions do come in the chat is as we mentioned.

00:41:16:05 – 00:41:43:04

Speaker 1

Well thank you so much for that. We ensure step through the presentation. So clearly we do have one question and maybe as we’re answering that question, others may want to come forward and ask. So, there’s a question from Catherine who said, would you use the system and the complaints process for things like reports about neighbour’s garden rather than complaints being service failures?

00:41:44:07 – 00:42:07:17

Speaker 2

Yeah, definitely. That is an option in the system. I think as I covered earlier, the complaint could be raised by anybody. And so, if the neighbour is if not, perhaps not a V to C tenant, but the tenant, you know, the neighbour they want to complain about is we can, I believe, do something about that. So yeah, neighbours’ gardens and so on.

00:42:08:12 – 00:42:30:16

Speaker 3

Can I just build on that a little bit as well. We had a really good debate about this, about whether the complaint and the failure and service delivery should be closely tied together, but whether we should treat the complaint separate from the service delivery. I think where we landed was rather the business’s preference was to treat the complaint separately.

00:42:30:27 – 00:42:57:08

Speaker 3

So yeah, you might have a service request come through the case management system about that garden. And then if, if that area is service fee, it might spawn a complaint which is kind of separate but linked. And that’s the, that’s how we’ve chosen to tackle this. We did talk that through with the Ombudsman as well, just to kind of get their read reading on how we should and how we should approach that.

00:42:57:13 – 00:43:18:14

Speaker 3

They and they were quite happy that you could go either way, really as long as you’re demonstrating that you’re dealing with the complaints in line with their guidance, they were quite happy for either the complaint to be embedded in the service delivery or to treat the complaint separately from the service delivery. So, I hope that helps answer the question a bit, Catherine.

00:43:19:12 – 00:43:38:13

Speaker 1

It just remains for me to say again, thank you so much. As in the comments, your outcomes are really impressive, the improvements are staggering and we wish you all of the best as you continue on your transformation journey. And we look forward to having you back some time to talk about the next process. You’ve done.

00:43:40:00 – 00:43:40:19

Speaker 2

The project.

00:43:41:24 – 00:43:59:25

Speaker 1

So, thank you to you and thank you to everyone for joining us. Any other questions? Please let us know. Hello@netcall.com. Thank you and goodbye everyone.

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