Housing goes digital: the shift towards self-service

Nick Atkin, CEO at Halton Housing, spoke at our ‘Housing goes digital: the shift towards self-service,’ event to discuss the digitalisation of the housing sector, the journey and challenges, and the opportunity that digitalisation presents the industry to redefine the way we interact with customers, reduce transaction costs and improve productivity.

We spoke with Nick for some further insight on how Halton Housing uses a digitally led customer-focused approach to provide better support to those customers who really need it and ensure that the introduction of Universal Credit has a net nil overall impact on the organisation.
1. Why is it important for the housing sector to digitalise? 
“Two very good reasons. Firstly, it’s what your customers expect and indeed receive from all other service sectors, with the exception of housing. For the majority of our customers, we are a ‘hygiene factor’. They just want to be able to ask us to do something and then we deliver.
“Secondly is the fact that the rollout of Universal Credit is the single biggest change to our operating model in the last 40 years. Unless you provide facilities to enable more people to self-serve, how are you going to release the staffing resources needed to collect up to 65% of your income that you currently don’t collect? Furthermore, this also enables resources to be switched to provide intensive tenancy support for those customers who really need it.”
2. What are some of the benefits of introducing more digital processes?
“Our Digital First strategy aims to deliver 90% of customer-generated transactions through online self-serve routes by December 2018. Our approach fundamentally changes the way we deliver our services by allowing us to provide the right information in the right place, at the right time, 24/7/365.
“Drawing on robust internal data and, more importantly, information provided by our customers, including details about their access to online services and also how comfortable they are using them, has enabled us to develop tailored and focused solutions.
“Halton Housing customers who have no access to the internet have been provided with tablet devices. The solutions we have developed are simple, easy to use and consistent, ensuring an excellent customer experience. These include a customer app, website portal, proactive LiveChat, automated payment lines and intelligent voice queues.”
3. For your customers in particular, what have been the main positive impacts of some of the digital processes you have introduced and what feedback have you received from them?
“The results speak for themselves. Approximately 70% of households are now contacting us digitally, with over 87% of all customer led transactions now carried out via these channels. Some 40% of all repairs are now reported digitally, and 99% of rent balance queries, reducing transaction costs from approx. £15 to less than £1. 
“We have also seen a reduction in incoming and outgoing calls by over 60% which has resulted in a 50% reduction in the number of people in our customer service team. The implications of this? We are now able to provide more intensive support for the most vulnerable of our customers by placing those people in other roles supporting customers."
4. What are some of the challenges of implementing more digital processes? How can we overcome these?
“We knew that there were better ways of transacting with customers, as well as a myriad of opportunities to automate many processes within our systems. By improving our services and the way in which our customers access them, we could drive efficiencies across the business and focus on our really vulnerable customers who needed more intensive support from us.
“Our Digital First strategy enables customers to gain access to online services and supports them with this. Access to the internet via mobile devices has become integral to how many of us live our lives. Whilst it is second nature to us to use our mobile phones or tablets, often simultaneously, to bank online, research that next holiday, or keep up to date with friends and colleagues on social media sites there are still customers of ours who could have been left behind. By increasing our levels of support to these customers and introducing a range of unique solutions they are able to access the multitude of benefits the internet has to offer.”
5. Within your organisation, how has going digital helped your employees in terms of workplace productivity and managing their work-life balance? 
“Each and every colleague is critical to successfully delivering digital transformation. The importance of providing employees with the right tools and support to be part of the journey cannot be underestimated. This is even more critical for those who, through our customers’ eyes, are the face of the organisation. In many cases, these are frontline employees who may not see their role as being helping people to get online or self-serve. 
“I have a long-held belief that work is something you do, not somewhere you go. This philosophy has been fully embraced by the team at Halton Housing. It has enabled us to deliver services through a fully flexible, remote, agile working approach. If you’ve been to visit us in our new home at Waterfront Point, you can’t help but notice the absence of banks of desks with fixed computers or telephones. Each employee has two devices depending on the requirements of their role. This enables them to work from mobile devices where they work best, where and/or when the business requires this which has enabled us to be much more responsive and flexible to what our customers require. 
“Key to the success of this approach has been the buy-in from senior managers and the board. It must be led by example and from the top.
“The path along our Digital First journey has meant we also needed to look at how Halton Housing staff communicate internally. Anyone who knows me will know this is something I’m really passionate about. Since 2014, we have introduced a number of measures to drive change in how employees communicate with each other and reduce the clutter of internal email. The introduction of Microsoft Office 365, with Skype and Yammer, has been instrumental to this.”
6. When hiring new employees into your team, what key skills and attributes are you looking for among candidates?
“We recruit for attitude and not skills. You can provide most people with the skills they need to do most things but you can’t change how they think and their core values. This is what our recruitment process focuses on.
“We operate a truly agile working approach where there are no desks in our workspace and everyone works from two devices. For some, this is a real shift from what they may have been used to and so we ensure new people joining us are comfortable and confident with this way of working. Key to this is the right interpersonal skills as well as being able to work anywhere from any device.”
7. For other businesses looking to digitalise, will they need to bring in additional skills to support the new processes or would an in-house training and development programme be suitable to prepare existing staff for the changes? 
“Digital transformation is a journey. This is why we’ve partnered with HACT to develop Digibite. This is due to be launched later this month. It is a detailed digital transformation methodology for the affordable housing sector and provides a bite-sized view of the benefits of digital.
“This shares the learning from the Halton journey of how following a digital path could benefit other organisations. The approach uses a wide range of metrics and softer measures, to highlight the results that can be achieved.”