Not Gonna Change

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy
or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy


If you are a regular visitor here, you will know that I regularly blog about change. Looking at things differently, being more efficient, saving time, money and trying hard to make things work better. From where I am standing, it looks like a noble cause.

Now change isn't everyone's cup of tea, I get that. Inevitably though I am involved in helping someone, change something, pretty much wherever I work. Working smarter is what IT does let us do. Its scalable in a very different way to the use of human admin staff.

But what can we do when some of the main themes of change threaten to unseat some of the well-entrenched teams within our organisations? '

I have encountered ICT infrastructure teams, not being keen first on virtualisation, then the mystical and unreliable notion of 'moving server capacity to the cloud'. As I have heard people describe that feeling, it's like 'turkeys voting for Christmas around here Tony'.

That is one example that I have seen on a regular basis over the last five years. In that time, The Cloud has come of age and so have contracts and service agreements which police the safety of our data, when its migrated there. More and more data, storage and applications are being cloud hosted or via a robust managed service.

Arguments in its favour are being won and you know what, I am noticing some infrastructure teams, you know the ones who used to look after 'The Tin', are shrinking. I have known some of those displaced staff be retrained and re-deployed in ICT roles, in the same organisations. 
Cloud being one thing, the next biggest migration everyone is working on is 'Channel Shift' & 'Omni-Channel'. I am sure you will agree.

A story that I heard recently, related to a substantial sized customer service team, meeting to kick-start the journey to 'Channel Shift'. Internet portals and tablet Apps were discussed, the usual stuff. As anyone knows who has done any serious work in this area, the low-hanging fruit transactions are the ones to be tackled first.

Logging repairs and payments are probably the logical initial ones.

As soon as some detail was being put on the Omni-Channel bones, some of the ambitions were being toned down. When asked why it was not going to be the 'puppies privates' for customers, the riposte was 'well, we can't make it too good, it might affect the size of our service centre then, if we were not getting enough telephone calls'.

Well, if I was in that meeting, I might well have remarked, "isn't that quite the whole point?", because it clearly is. Getting transactions done in pence, not ten pounds a time, is totally the point.

The customer culture inside Ryanair and Easyjet is no doubt very different to that in most of our own organisations. Chances are neither started with a sizable call centre post 1997, most transactions online, from that first wet-leased charter from (London [sic]) Luton to Edinburgh. They still let you phone the call centre of course and you will probably get through faster than phoning HMRC. Maybe 20-30 minutes after suffering some bland techno. It drives you to the website, to do your business there.

However, how should we deal with a shrinking service centre, where the staff have noticed it may be shrinking?

Some of the existing KPI's might certainly need a good looking at.

Should the service centre be picking up 85% of calls within five rings? If CTI can identify callers who may be over 65 years old, vulnerable or having a designated disability, maybe those become the service centre priority? Agreement with the board and/or TP groups might even allow online to be a preferred channel, if we make it easy enough to use. Forms need to be simple to use and multi-platform, fitting tablets, Smartphone's and laptop devices well.

Payments must be simple, like paying for stuff on ebay. User-centered design at all times, with existing processes re-engineered to reduce number of steps required by the customer.

A KPI looking at overall average cost per call type, rewarding a declining value and increasing satisfaction, might be just the motivation needed.  These are the new yardsticks IMHO, for our service centre managers of the future. Empires of the past will gradually be swept away. If not, they will be priced out of existence.

Great service centre managers will need to preside over lower transaction costs, rather than a big swanky team of advisors. Its going the way of the typing pool my friends, or maybe ICT hardware & infrastructure teams. Mark my words.

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Related Post: Don't judge books by covers, or application software by how its badged... 

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Swing Out Sister - Not Gonna Change.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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Yammer Be There - Banning Internal Email

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

I read an interesting article this week about Halton Housing Trust looking to ban email by 2014, that captured my imagination. An estimated forty per cent of staff time was spent ‘dealing with internal email that is of no value for the business’. Read the full article in InsideHousing here http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/regulation/landlord-plans-to-ban-internal-email/6524652.article


The decision to ban email was inspired by a similar move by Atos Consulting, spookily enough located right next to HHT's building in Runcorn, Cheshire.

Maybe some advice was exchanged in the smoking area between both buildings. I certainly think there is some mileage in that one.

One replacement being considered is Yammer, the business social media collaboration platform acquired by Microsoft in Summer 2012 for $1.2 Billion. Presumably HHT will be using many of the premium features. It will be interesting in what direction Microsoft does decide to take it. Some of that uncertainty might put me off personally. I can imagine Yammer fitting right in very quickly with the bright young things of Silicon Valley type companies. To get the most from it within HHT and possibly other housing providers I would guess a lot of training and a genuine change of mindset from all staff expected to use it, might be needed.


Email can be very disruptive and particularly in the same way that staff are provided with Excel and never trained to use it properly, then waste person years going around the houses performing tasks badly. Email can be the same. Outlook or a similar email client is provided and rarely are users coached in how to deal with email coming in, proper use of To: , cc: and bcc: .

How many times have three people been named in a ‘To:’ box and nobody deals with it because they think the other two must be on to it. 

Also how many times have you been emailed by the person sitting next to you, instead of the two of you just discussing and resolving an issue?


Instant messaging can sometimes be even worse, something that can be responded to straight away, like a phone call, not like emails that can be left and dealt with at an appropriate time.


One aspect about emails that is really good however is the trail it provides. A perfect audit sometimes to disprove claims and assertions. This is one area that cannot be lost with a move to Yammer or A.N.Other. One phrase that I should actually have programmed in to a function key for outlook as I type it so much is ‘Confirming our earlier discussion..’ . The perfect way to document what has gone on be all parties.


A number of RSL’s with appropriate housing management systems have moved from internal email to workflow tasking or use of tasking in-trays. This means that any internal activity, that most likely will involve one or more people, can be traced via CRM or other modules of an integrated system. Any decent tasking system allows escalation, referral and closure of tasks, with corresponding activities closed off or set at an appropriate status on completion.


For example, a resident request for repair logged as a CRM call might generate a pre-inspection, a repair job, that job may be passed to the internal workforce. Several internal tasks (which could before have been emails) might be raised based on job issues. When these tasks are resolved, the job is closed and CRM call completed. Obviously, this flow can be embedded in workflow and tasking, something that would not be practical when using just email.


Now if Microsoft integrated Yammer more fully into Dynamics CRM, took advantage of standard workflow and Sharepoint for presentation, I think that would give existing options a great run for their money. Good luck to HHT, as one of my local RSL’s I would be pleased to see how this project unfolds.

Read on, more social media in housing:

http://tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.com/2013/09/three-little-birds.html

James Ingram and Michael Mcdonald say "Yah Mo B There".


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk

PS I have noticed I have been getting a lot of traffic from the Housing Southern IT Forum recently http://sit-forum.co.uk/. Thanks everyone, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle, please get in touch and let me know!

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