Civica to help Thrive Homes transform services for tenants and leaseholders
30 JUNE 2009: Hertfordshire based housing association, Thrive Homes, is to provide an advanced new customer contact centre from 20 July, following an agreement with Civica, a market leader in software-based solutions that help organisations to improve service delivery and efficiency.
This dedicated customer contact centre forms part of Thrive Homes’ multi-million pound investment programme to improve the quality of housing following a convincing vote where 4 out of 5 customers were in favour of transferring the 3,700 rented and 440 leasehold homes from Three Rivers District Council to Thrive Homes in 2008. Civica’s Contact Management, Workflow and Electronic Document Management (EDM) solutions have been selected to provide the technology to support first class customer service.
The solution, together with Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) facilities supplied by Civica Connect, will be integrated with Thrive Home’s existing Academy (Capita) back office housing system. Thrive Homes aims to increase the number of customer phone calls that are resolved first time, a key part of this is being able to quickly and easily identify callers’ details to ensure queries are resolved more quickly.
Additional benefits from the technology include:
- Reduced paperwork, as all documents will be held electronically to reduce the risk of loss and the amount of storage space required
- A more streamlined service, as all back and front office systems are integrated to allow customer service agents to all tenant information quickly and easily
- Housing association team leaders can keep more precise tabs on team performance, monitoring what’s effective and identifying the need to allocate more staff to a particular area or function if there is a spike in calls for any reason
Jo Barrett, Acting Operations Director, Thrive Homes comments: “We are determined to ensure our new dedicated customer contact centre delivers outstanding service. Our timescale for implementation was critical and it was imperative that the new software-based system was in place quickly. Ultimately, the flexibility of the workflow solution will enable us to design process to ensure our services are efficient, cost effective and customer focused. We have introduced a freephone number so our tenants and leaseholders can call us on 0800 917 6077 at no cost to themselves. The customer contact centre will be based at our office in Croxley Green, and aims to resolve most queries first-time.”
John Hood, Managing Director, Housing and Asset Management, Civica comments: “Civica is at the forefront of bringing innovative solutions to all parts of the Housing Sector, regardless of which back office system is used. Thrive Homes and Civica are committed to a joint vision of improved customer service in a modern environment, removing unnecessary paperwork processes and resolving the maximum number of calls at the first point of contact. By implementing the solution above the existing back office system, deployment can be rapid giving immediate benefits within a very short timeframe.”