USE OF COOKIES & TRACKING

Cookies help us to provide the website.

Technical cookies

Technical cookies are essential to ensure the functions of the website work efficiently and securely and to ensure that integrated services such as customer login and training registrations function smoothly. Therefore, you cannot deactivate these cookies.

Cookies and tracking

We use various third-party online services to help us to enrich the website with additional functions and to improve the online offers with collected statistical data on visits to the website as well as data on user behaviour (tracking). Therefore, we would appreciate you accepting the associated cookies and tracking.

settings
linkedin
youtube

hubspot

Detailed information on cookies and tracking

Detailed information can be found on the page Privacy notice, where you can turn cookies and tracking on or off under Privacy Settings.

Privacy Statements

Privacy Statement - Processor (Customer)
Privacy Statement - Controller (Applicant, Employee and Marketing)

the-art-of-self-service
Aareon Digital Solutions

News

The Art of Self-Service

The Art of getting customers to help themselves through self-service, by Geraint Griffiths, Managing Director at Aareon UK

The Art of Self-Service

Self-service is now an integral part of our daily lives. Self-service check-outs at supermarkets are second nature and in banking, self-service apps are ubiquitous. It’s also commonplace to book medical appointments online and to receive texts reminding you to attend. Naturally, this sets a marvellous precedent for social housing.

There have been many technology advances that have impacted social housing: digital by default, IoT, big data and cloud to name just a few, which raises both challenges and opportunities. However, of all these, it’s self-service that is likely to have the greatest impact, whether through tenant portals or dedicated apps.

At Aareon, we have a number of customers who have pioneered selfservice, such as Raven Housing, Thrive Homes, Thenue and Halton Housing. Their aim is to encourage the majority of tenants to manage their accounts online. This significantly reduces the transactional demand on the organisation, particularly around call-centre costs where staffing and ‘on-costs’, such as office space, are significant.

So, what’s the key to the widespread adoption of self-service technology? It’s a process of changing customers’ hearts and minds to convert desire into action. To effect this change, there are three areas to address:

Omni-channel marketing

I’m always impressed by the marketing ingenuity of housing providers to drive self-service use. There are traditional methods such as advertising, PR and direct mail. Even more interesting though, is when the housing providers add targeted customer messages to their vans or print them on rent statements. Others produce slick social media content to emphasise the benefits.

Online content and service availability

There is now an enormous range of information and a plethora of services that can be accessed through self-service systems. For example, tenants can: update contact details; view rent statements, balances and arrears; make payments; request and schedule repairs and view repairs history; generate electrical and gas certificates; log estate issues and anti-social behaviour; rent garages; and upload photos and videos (e.g. graffiti or fly-tipping).

To be effective though, all of these need to be viewable simultaneously within an online 360-degree dashboard, ensuring that all customer requests, actions and opportunities are contextual and holistic. Customers gain a single-view of their own tenancy, property and estate and can also view this when visited by their landlord’s staff. Thus, they can discuss care issues with their own housing officer or report an estate issue to a gas engineer. This cross-functional visibility negates the traditional view of organisational silos and boosts both efficiency and customer care.

Professional UX and UI

When housing systems were first developed, they were by an IT supplier for a housing provider – i.e. they were business-to-business (B2B). By contrast, self-service is business-to-consumer (B2C). Such systems only work properly if they are extremely easy-to-use. Consumers are quite knowledgeable today and they have high usability expectations. The failure to recognise this inhibits adoption and damages credibility.

At Aareon, we needed to get this right first-time with best-practice technology. We needed to develop agile systems that housing providers could tailor to customers’ needs. To this effect, we have partnered with digital agency Dootrix, widely acclaimed for their excellence in this field. Dootrix is working on the UX and UI integrally deployed though our self-service systems.

Dootrix’s agile development teams are expert, multi-discipline specialists who design and develop mobile, web and cloud applications. Through detailed analysis and prototyping, they use agile techniques to deliver truly intuitive and frictionless customer solutions.

Dootrix’s head of marketing Elliott King said, “The end-user hates clunky technology and appreciates intuitive alternatives. We add exactly that expertise to our clients’ digital propositions. As one of the UK’s leading suppliers of housing systems, Aareon’s software represents top-flight integration and eloquent development, setting high standards across all aspects of their work including self-service.”

Emerging customer demand for self-service

The emergence of self-service at the operational heart of social housing customer management will certainly evolve further, delivering even more benefits to customers who need it most. This in itself is a worthy and valid outcome, but add in the efficiency savings and heightened value-for-money delivered through technology and the business case is complete.

Much of the success of self-service will be driven by inclusion and by fine-tuning the marketing campaigns used to persuade customers to adopt it. In a way though, by making the B2C interface so easy to use, the chances are that it ultimately could be customer demand itself leading housing providers to offer even more self-help.

Digital Solutions by Aareon

For more details on Digital Solutions by Aareon and how we can help your customers to self-serve, please see below links to the following product suites;

Aareon Mobile for Housing

Self-Service App for Housing

Aareon Customer Portal

Download the full 'Art of Self Service' article

Please fill in your details below in order to download files

 
Mandatory Field
Mandatory FieldPlease enter a valid email address.
Mandatory Field
Mandatory Field
Mandatory Field
Privacy
Mandatory Field
captcha
new code
The code does not match the picture
Please wait a moment, your data is being processed.
Thank you for contacting us!
to top