We know our customers want and expect a great service when they need to get in touch with us – whether it’s to get help with a repair, make a rent enquiry or ask for support. Customer care is important to us too – we’ve had a long-term aim to make it ‘effortless’ for our customers to deal with us. We’re constantly changing how we work to help make this a reality. But sometimes life throws us all a curve ball.
One of those came our way in the start of 2023 when our customer contact centre hit a ‘perfect storm’ of issues. The team handles around 85,000 phone calls a year and demand peaks in the winter when the weather is worse and homes can take a battering or heating is in high demand.
This time the peak in calls unfortunately came at the same time as we were short staffed – like many organisations the pandemic left lasting recruitment issues in the workplace. On top of this we switched on our new computer system to manage our customer interactions. As is not uncommon the new system had a few glitches on top of introducing new ways of working for team members. Sadly these three things coming together put incredible strain on the team and resulted in much longer than normal delays to get through to us on the phone. At its worst some people had to wait as long as 45 minutes.
We were frustrated and so were our customers – you told us in no uncertain terms. So our team sprang into action to make some big behind the scenes changes. Because recruiting and training new team members is time consuming we focused our energies on improving this process.
As well as recruiting extra people quickly we restructured the team and created a new training post to focus on getting new team members up to speed as quickly as possible. We’ve also take a more flexible approach to how the team is managed to allow us to better adapt to changing call volumes during the year. And of course we supported the team to get to grips with the new computer system.
The changes took time to bed-in but within a few months we managed to drastically reduce call wait times. Those improvements have carried on and now 90% of customers have their call answered within five minutes. And we’ve learned from the situation so feel more confident the risk of wait times going sky high has been greatly reduced.
Meanwhile we continue on our journey to make our customer service effortless with a specialist team working across the business to better understand how we deal with customers end-to-end. They are redesigning each step of the process and finding lots of ways to make us more efficient. They are also listening to customer feedback on the way and involving our Insight Committee. So watch this space for more improvements and as ever please do keep sharing your feedback – it does make a difference.
