Weaving a Rich Strategy for Customer Management

With a sole focus on Social Housing, Aareon provides leading Housing Management Software and Digital Solutions to the UK Housing sector. We are proud to be the leading partner and driver of transformation, placing our customers at the heart of everything we do and delivering best in class solutions to support our customers’ plans and ambitions.

As part of an ongoing, in-depth engagement process, we have spent time with our customers to develop a shared understanding of emerging priorities for the Social Housing sector. Against the backdrop of Covid-19, we explored both its immediate impact on service provision and its longer-term implications for customer service strategy.

With a sole focus on Social Housing, Aareon provides leading Housing Management Software and Digital Solutions to the UK Housing sector. We are proud to be the leading partner and driver of transformation, placing our customers at the heart of everything we do and delivering best in class solutions to support our customers’ plans and ambitions.

As part of an ongoing, in-depth engagement process, we have spent time with our customers to develop a shared understanding of emerging priorities for the Social Housing sector. Against the backdrop of Covid-19, we explored both its immediate impact on service provision and its longer-term implications for customer service strategy.

The Engagement Process

Starting in October 2020, we facilitated a series of one-on-one workshops with individual customers. While there was some variation in the teams attending from each customer, the job roles represented typically included C Level, Heads of Transformation, Customer Experience, Organisational Capability, Digital Architecture, Innovation and Strategy. 

Hosted by members of the Aareon Senior Leadership team, the workshops discussed both Aareon’s transformation journey and each individual customer’s own transformation journeys. This peer-to-peer exchange surfaced significant synergies and alignment that we will explore later.

In addition to the almost weekly workshops, we also organised seven strategy forums. While our workshops focussed on individual customers, our Strategy Forums sought a include a wider range of housing sector stakeholders and industry participants.

To achieve cross-fertilisation of ideas, we had between six and nine housing organisations represented at each forum, some of which were in partnership with Housing Technology, the leading technology information service for the UK housing sector.

The forums examined the challenges facing the housing sector and, while there were common themes, each forum looked at the challenges from a slightly different angle.

We wanted to understand what the new ‘normal’ meant for the sector since Covid-19 and how it has affected customer service strategies. We also looked at the opportunities that the new normal has presented for the sector, and then examined the impact on the sector of the sudden need to change the way it worked. Finally, we examined the extent to which extent these sudden changes might affect the way the housing sector works in the future.

What we found were recurring patterns and themes as individual Housing Associations overcame the unprecedented challenge of serving customers during the worst of the pandemic. By synthesising the data outputs from the workshop with great care and consideration, we were able to identify ‘seven golden threads’ – core business transformation areas which have a fundamental impact on the ability of Housing Associations to optimise service provision.

Seven Golden Threads

The seven threads that emerged as being fundamental to innovation in customer service and the pursuit of excellence were:

1. Data:

   Data is critical to how we manage our businesses. But how reliable is it? How can you extract insight and how do you derive even more value from it? Reliable data enables future automation to drive operational efficiencies and allow focus on value added activities.

2. Integration:

   Systems need to be fully integrated so data can flow between them, linking the full end to end tenant lifecycle with all your business processes.

3. Insight:

   Turning the data we hold about people, places and processes into actionable insights.

4. Automation:

   With reliable data in connected systems, managed workflows will deliver better end to end tenant experiences

5. Mobility & Agility:

   The ability to work from anywhere with ease and reliability has never been more important. Both tenants and staff need to access systems and processes from any location on any device.

6. Omni-channel:

   The experiences we deliver need to be friction-free, providing multiple contact options to meet individual tenants’ channel preferences.

7. Differentiation:

   Different tenants have different needs. Identifying which needs each tenant has enables services and contact to be personalised and targeted.