Housing Group Extend Multichannel Roll-Out

Together Housing Group have deployed phase two of a multichannel customer service solution from mplsystems.

This included the introduction of an advanced webchat function alongside their existing telephone and email channels. Together Housing will now be able to provide a multichannel experience to their customer base of over 50,000 tenants.

The webchat solution has been deployed across five of the housing group’s regional contact centres: Chevin Housing Association, Green Vale Homes, Housing Pendle, Pennine Housing and Twin Valley Homes. To keep the regional identity of each of the group’s businesses, and in line with their new website development, mplsystems individually branded each webchat solution.

Customers can now start a webchat conversation with the contact centre at a click of a button. The iContact platform routes the enquiry to the most suitable agent, based on skill or location, quickly connecting the customer to the contact centre. The agent desktop software then screen-pops all relevant customer information on to their screen, including the customer’s initial webchat enquiry, contact details, previous contact history and any tenancy information.

Although the agents are only managing one webchat at a time in the deployment phase, they will eventually be able to manage up to three live webchats simultaneously. If one contact centre becomes busier than others, iContact will route the webchat or other form of communication to another regional team to assist. This means Together Housing will eventually be able to work as one virtual customer service team, helping improve the overall customer service provided by the group.

“As the digital environment is becoming increasingly popular among our customers, we wanted to extend our offering by deploying an online webchat solution in line with our digital access strategy,” said Ian Swithenbank, Customer Services Performance Team Leader.

“Although still in early stages of the deployment, we are looking forward to seeing the impact this will have on the contact centre and what our customers think about using this as a channel in to the customer service centre,” said Stephen Batley, Group Head of Customer Services.

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