£1.9 million agreement between Civica and Hackney Council to transform services for tenants and leaseholders
Civica’s Universal Housing System provides basis for new IT infrastructure
Hackney Homes, an Arm's Length Management Organisation (ALMO) commissioned by Hackney Council, is to overhaul its entire IT operation following a shared risk and reward £1.9million agreement with Civica, a market leader in software-based solutions that help organisations to improve service delivery and efficiency. Through its Universal Housing and Servitor solutions, Civica will deliver new contact centre software, online services, workflow systems, mobile working and home working facilities that will transform Hackney Homes’ approach to resident service over the next two years.
By agreeing a shared risk and reward approach, Civica is committed to work with Hackney Homes to ensure that the implemented changes deliver measurable improvements in service delivery and efficiency. Along with improved customer satisfaction scores, success will be measured by improvements in Hackney Homes Audit Commission star rating.
The incumbent systems will be replaced with:
- New contact centre systems to instantly identify callers and access all information from a central database, allowing one agent to resolve any resident enquiry during the first call
- New online services, that will automate processes such as maintenance requests and rent balance enquiries
- New analytical software to help tailor services to tenants and leaseholders; workflow software to enhance staff performance and ensure services are consistently provided to all customers.
- Mobile working systems for property repair teams; home working infrastructure for all workers
- Anti-social behaviour solutions to track incidents across Hackney Homes’ properties
The first phase, due to be completed in September 2008, will incorporate the anti-social behaviour division and Hackney Homes’ contact centre.
Trish Haill, Head of ICT Services, Hackney Homes, comments: “Rather than update existing systems we wanted to start afresh, implementing the latest technology to deliver a cutting-edge service to tenants and improved working environment for the Hackney Homes team. This partnership with Civica has already delivered far more than software and services; their input on the strategic direction of Hackney Homes has proved invaluable.”
John Hood, Managing Director, Housing, Civica comments: “As housing organisations are under increasing pressure to deliver outstanding customer service to tenants, Hackney Homes has seized the challenge with gusto to introduce an outstanding array of tenant-based services. We are looking forward to the project as it unfolds over the next two years.”
The contract was awarded in May 2008, following the EU competitive dialogue procurement process. The project will run over two years.
Editor’s notes
Designed for the back office, the Universal Housing System is the core operating environment for housing associations, incorporating administration systems to collect and monitor rent payments, schedule housing maintenance and allocate stock to tenants. Using a combination of electronic document management and workflow systems, Universal is designed to bring administration systems together in one programme to make it easy to get an all encompassing view of each tenant’s information, rather than holding different information in different departments across the association.
- Contact Manager, Civica’s front office solution, which is linked to UH makes it possible to:
Very quickly identify callers and log details of the call
- Depending on nature of the call, open the relevant Council, ALMO or housing association database immediately
- Identify calls simply by a registered telephone number, with no need to run through personal details such as name and address
- Ensure team leaders can keep more precise tabs on team performance, monitoring what’s effective and identifying the need to allocate more operators to a particular housing association if there is a “spike” in calls for any reason
Servitor is a flexible job management solution that has been tailored to meet the business requirements of a repair and maintenance organisation. It incorporates job costing and control, stores and purchasing, tenant appointments and resource scheduling, supports planned servicing and planned maintenance, customer survey and post inspections, and incorporates a mobile solution. Servitor mobile is fully integrated with Servitor to ensure that new job details can be dispatched to the relevant operative. The operative provides real-time updates to the back-office systems covering the status of the work including time taken and materials used. Servitor provides the flexibility and scalability to meet existing and new business requirements, and future growth plans.