Housing Association make gains in service and efficiency
Housing Associations make major gains in service and efficiency
Since the directive from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Housing Associations are under increasing pressure achieve excellence in customer service.
What does this mean to you, and how is it achieved? What do we mean by excellence?
What is needed is a paradigm shift within the organisation, a clear focus on the customer at all levels from Board level to Scheme Managers.
Excellence means empathising with your customer, proactively focussing on addressing their needs and meeting their requirements. But communication is a two way street. It is no good being proactive in upgrading window insulation if the primary concern of your residents is street crime. How can you establish this two way dialogue with your customers?
A process overhaul is needed to align internal resources with external factors, cutting down red tape, freeing staff from administration to allow more time to talk to customers. There are other external factors, the Housing Association industry has fundamentally changed; now only the fittest survive. Size matters, increasing consolidation and acquisition is changing the face of the industry as the major players look to leverage economies of scale.
So there are two drivers to internal change – delivering excellence in customer service and delivering operational efficiency in order to streamline internal process. But where do you start? Management need to address process reengineering through all facets of internal operations, stripping down administration and putting feet on the street.
However, the true burden of change falls on the IT Manager. Underpinning all of the operational changes must be a robust IT policy, encompassing all aspects of organisational operations. Systems such as CRM, Document Management and Work Flow software have been common place in the private sector for several years, now they are hot topics for Housing Associations across the country.
Thin client applications such as Citrix are increasing in popularity within the sector, IP telephone systems and PDAs are allowing scheme managers to stay in touch with both customers and the office, whilst delivering dramatic improvements in productivity at all levels.
The foundation of all the above applications is the need for a robust and scalable communications network. Legacy systems, generally built on Kilostream, Megastream or Frame Relay will quickly start to groan under the weight of increased data traffic. Convergence is a buzz word, but efficiency must be a focus – what use is a converged voice and data network if the rental costs outweight the cost savings?
Some savvy housing associations are looking to new technology to achieve exactly the network efficiencies that are required. Be it squeezing more bandwidth out of their network budgets to support more bandwidth intensive applications on their networks. Or using more flexible networking technology to allow for the incorporation of other housing associations through mergers and acquisitions.
Managed Communications is an ADSL networking company that is working with a number of
Hill-Haimes MD of Managed Communications said, “we are seeing IP telephony, video conferencing and other bandwidth intensive applications driving the need to upgrade networks in housing associations. Many associations are unaware of the use of DSL networks to enable such applications without increasing network cost …. other associations we work with enjoy the flexibility of DSL – when change such as mergers occur, we can turn sites onto our VPN services for instance in as little time as 5 working days. With leased lines the wait can be months and the costs horrendous.”
The message is clear, technology can help achieve improved levels of service, technology can enable the efficiencies from M&A activity but this can come at a cost especially with regards to Housing Association networks. New networking technology can mitigate these costs, and there are innovative associations managing to implement new faster converged networks without incurring incremental network spend.
