Newly-merged housing group elevates employee & customer engagement

The Challenges: Legacy systems “nightmare”

Platform Housing Group aims to deliver a high standard of service across its communications channels for staff and customers. Created by a merger of two housing associations, the Group found themselves with disparate telephony systems.

“It was a nightmare to manage,” recalls Mohammed Zabir, the Group’s Director of Technology & Delivery. “We had to support over 20 on-premise servers, plus SIP trunks, ISDN lines, and multiple vendor licenses and relationships.”

The organization had to find a single communications platform that could offer a unified experience for customers from each of the merged associations.

The new infrastructure also needed the agility to support the Group’s operational culture, so 60% of staff could work remotely. A reliable, highly available platform offering easy integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 was also essential.

The Group found the answer — after exploring the market and checking out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the ideal unified communications solution.

The Solution: Swift transformation

The Group was able to improve employee and customer engagement by selecting the cloud-based 8×8 eXperience Communications Platform and 8×8 Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS).

“8×8 met our requirements,” says Zabir. “We quickly recognized the benefits of out-of-the-box functionality, simplified management, and valuable insights into call stats.”

The newly-merged organization could transform within three weeks to allow 900 staff to communicate, collaborate, and engage from anywhere. Customer experiences would also improve in many ways, including the ability to make secure payments through integration with the Group’s payment provider.

Platform Housing Group then pushed innovation to the next level — by enabling its property maintenance division to offer ‘live’ augmented video triage calls to customers. A month-long pilot proved a massive success, with engineers succeeding in remotely solving 39% of issues, many of which occurred out of hours.

Customers could initiate video interactions with a simple click — and no downloads — from an SMS message sent to their phone by the Customer Hub. Engineers could then view equipment, suggest actions, and even use augmented reality to draw instructions on their iPads. If issues couldn’t be solved remotely, then images and details could be saved for reference, ahead of a site visit.

The Benefits: Greater speed and savings

“The financial benefits are huge,” says Zabir. “The £50,000 saved on communications hardware per year is just the beginning, once you factor in a host of time-savings. The phone bill is almost zero each month and when we added 300 users, our costs remained virtually static.”

“Data checks happen before people speak to an agent and it’s easy for us to fine tune the IVR,” adds Jon Cocker, the Group’s Chief Information Officer. “Previously, changes relied on IT and took one day. Now the front end, IVR, and call queues are simple for the Customer Hub to manage.” These now take a matter of minutes and empower the team.

8×8’s advanced call analytics and service resilience excelled when floods hit local areas. “People could work remotely immediately,” says Cocker. “We could also search call transcripts for keywords to see the big picture on how customers were being impacted.”

Platform Housing now has the tools to keep optimizing engagement. It plans to expand the use of augmented reality and also add artificial intelligence to its IVR, enabling customers to access their accounts and serve themselves 24/7