We were finalists in not one, but two categories at Housing Digital’s Housing Innovation Awards this year.
The ceremony celebrates housing providers who embrace emerging technologies and digital transformation, and we were shortlisted for ‘Best use of data’ and ‘Best use of automation or AI in housing’.
The ‘Best use of data’ application showed our new streamlined process to help us identify properties we may need to sell in the future. The data used to assess this was often held in numerous systems or not up-to-date, which made it time consuming to properly assess each property.
Thanks to new systems we can now see all this data at a glance in a single report. This isn’t about reducing our number of homes, in fact it’s the opposite. Sometimes a home might not be right or viable for our customers’ needs and selling it means we can reinvest the money in our current homes and future new builds that are more comfortable and affordable to live in.
The ‘Best use of automation or AI in housing’ application highlighted the variety of automation processes we use and how these are saving our colleagues hundreds of hours of time – 280 hours in 2024! This whopping save has come from developing an app for our tenancy support team. We’ve been rolling this out in phases and with each stage comes more time being saved through automation. Even from the first phase we reduced a 23-hour-a-month admin task down to just six hours, saving days’ worth of work.
One of our goals is to deliver effortless customer experience and technology plays a huge part in this. So, we’ll continue to look for more effective and efficient ways of working. It’s a win for our colleagues by saving them from repetitive admin jobs and a win for our customers by getting the support they need quicker.
