Failure Demand: "Demand caused by failure to do something or do something right for the customer"
Seddon, 2003
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Over the course of the past year, the contact centre has been changed forever, with social distancing requirements meaning that familiar methods of face-to-face contact are now unavailable. In light of these shifts, social media, video and email contact are now regularly utilised as the primary channels for customer queries – a trend that we have seen on the rise for some years now. Between March and November 2020, we saw a significant update in the use of online channels, with 54% of organisations reporting an increase in email contact, 52% reporting an increase in social media, and 65% reporting an increase in the use of web chat.
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Optimising internal and external communications for a top housing association
About Cottsway Housing
Operating across West Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire, Cottsway Housing provides and maintains rental and shared ownership properties for more than 10,000 tenants, from single-person flats to family homes.
Challenges
As a company that emphasises the importance of openness and engagement between staff and tenants, Cottsway has always relied on its internal and external telecommunications solutions. However, their legacy PBX phone system, hosted on-site, eventually became challenging and time-consuming to manage. Concerns over this single point of failure were compounded by the difficulty of simultaneously managing Microsoft Teams for internal use. This combination of legacy systems and disparate platforms meant actionable analytics were difficult to achieve, thanks to a lack of oversight of all channels of communication.
Solution
Exponential-e proposed, designed and delivered a completely new communications ecosystem for Cottsway, utilising Direct Routing with Microsoft Teams, combined with resilient SIP trunking for external calls. This unified solution successfully consolidated Cottsway's telecommunications ecosystem while providing a range of additional tools for both internal and external communications. At the same time, to answer the ongoing need for effective analytics and reporting, Exponential-e's Contact Centre solution was deployed, allowing for all customer communications to be tracked and monitored, providing managers with comprehensive reporting and a real-time overview of customer satisfaction across the entire organisation.
The new choice of communication channels, combined with dramatically improved call quality, had a highly positive effect on Cottsway's overall levels of customer satisfaction, while staff voiced appreciation of the improved level of collaboration between teams, and the volume of high-quality training material that was now accessible online, thanks to the roll-out of automated call recording.
During 2020, and the forced move to a distributed workforce in response to COVID-19, this infrastructure proved invaluable in allowing Cottsway's teams to begin working remotely with minimal disruption, maintaining contact with their tenants through the same channels, with the same high standard of performance.
Solution benefits
- A fully consolidated infrastructure, with a single collaboration platform and optimal scalability
- Consistently high-quality calls and enhanced staff collaboration through an omnichannel Microsoft Teams solution
- A smooth transition to remote working for all staff, without compromising customer service or call quality
- Better staff retention, thanks to an extensive library of online training resources
- Improved customer and tenant satisfaction across all regions
We have noticed a huge improvement with regards to staff performance and our ability to respond to customers more efficiently. Since we have gone live, we have also received a number of comments from customers noting how quick we have responded to their enquiry
Rachael Higgins
Customer Service Manager, Cottsway Housing.
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