Common Housing Register People

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

 
Smuggled out just prior to the Christmas 2016 break, you may have missed the news that popular Common Housing Register software supplier, Abritas have now been acquired by Civica.I had heard a whisper earlier in the autumn and thought this an interesting one.

In the deal, Civica pick up the web based housing needs, options & letting application, including an online mutual exchange tool to help tenants swap homes (www.swapandmove.co.uk). This follows on from other merger & acquisitions related to UKHousing, such as Keystone Asset Management, a few years ago and Coldharbour for community care.

This acquisition is billed naturally from Simon Reynolds of Abritas as "...the next stage in the development of our business and is a very positive step for employees, customers and partners".

Past experiences of other products being merged into a group, have resulted in a (sometimes shoddy) re-badge of software, merging of help/support desks, loss of experienced staff, loss of focus, increased prices and generally some deterioration of service to customers and end-users.Perhaps Civica may consider moving some of those incoming web developers, over to the Cx implementations. Particularly one organisation I am working with, would benefit greatly from that.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves, with the many clients I work with, using Abritas solutions and moving over to the Cx Housing system. I do tend to hear a degree of moaning, although I am unsure if that is a result of bad initial specification of CHR requirements when procuring or any particular service issues. Common Housing Registers can be contentious and I often see them hosted on particular HMS letting platforms, such as Northgate, Orchard and others. Other CHR platforms are available. Keeping all CHR partners happy however, is no mean feat.  

It will have netted Civica a number of new customers, as around 170 organisations are currently thought to utilise CHR's across the UK.

Read the full announcement here.

As ever, if I can help with Common Housing Register, EDRMS, Housing, Finance, Mobile, Channel Shift, Scheduling or Contractor systems, please be in touch!

Catch the blog monthly archive at https://archive.org/details/@housingitguy

Related Post: Why does #UKhousing have such a problem with BYOD mobiles? 

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Pulp - Common People.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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Communication Breakdown

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

Twitter is a wonderful thing. Even more so I think, when you meet some of your mutual followers in real life. I had the great pleasure of meeting one of my followers this week for a spot of lunch and a chance to put the social housing world to rights. Rest assured, next month, we will be tackling the Middle East.

Yvonne is a retired, but very active as a social housing tenant, in her community and with her housing provider. She has completed many TPAS courses and takes pride in spreading the positive message of involvement with her landlord. IMHO we need plenty more Yvonne's in our homes and many more of her age digitally connected/happy to educate others. A keen eBay'er, I put her on to Auctionstealer.co.uk and Quidco to further enhance her on-line shopping savings.

More and more retired and older residents are now being introduced to the web and how it can improve their lives. I feel that even compared with two years ago, we are in a very different place. Even Barclays are getting in on the action. They know the cash and service improvement value of customers using the internet, rather than physical branches to bank. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diWTH3QIcuY where the pleasures of Google maps, Skype and of course Barclays fine on-line banking are revealed. If as an RSL you have not got an interactive internet portal, for customers to log/check repairs, see rent statements/make payments or log ASB etc, you are already failing badly.

I was interested to hear from Yvonne, what she felt was the biggest area she felt would improve her relationship with her landlord. The answer was better communication. "They never come back to me", just about sums it up. Communication is the key. Quite often, tenants ask questions on the telephone, by email or other channels and those requests can just be lost. Not intentionally in many cases, but frustrating nonetheless.

So how can IT and software applications tackle this? Well, most integrated Housing Management Systems incorporate CRM, Front Desk Query, Tasking, Workflow Trays etc, so we have the means of recording all these interactions. So we have the means. If you don't have the means, find out what you could introduce to supply this element. The next step is to have everyone buy in to use it. Now that should not be tricky, but you would be surprised how often people connive to resist introduction of CRM & tasking.

Now for me, I like the idea of a task tray. All the things I need to do, and when they are due. To meet the communication needs of residents like Yvonne, CRM needs to be used in both directions. That is where many organisations go wrong. Log interactions from your customer services centre and also when your staff interact, out of the office. In fact ALL interactions need to be logged (or accessible) within CRM. Tasking should support escalation, referral and effectively provide a 'snail-trail' of how that piece of communication was dealt with, at each step of the way. All staff need to be engaged, any gaps will create vulnerabilities and inevitably complaints. Those complaints cost money.

So have you got the software applications in your housing organisation to prevent 'Communication Breakdown' and are you really using it properly?

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You can link with me on LinkedIn here - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy It would be great to connect !

Read on to, 0845 on its last call for our customer service centres:

http://tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.com/2014/05/last-call-0845.html

Led Zeppelin - Communication Breakdown.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Universal Credit

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK


Well, no doubt about it, if I had £50 for every passionate person in housing I have talked about this subject with, I would certainly have over a grand in my jeans back pocket by now! If you have been working under a stone for the last two years, Universal Credit will centrally replace six of the main means-tested benefits and tax credits in the UK into one single monthly credit. Many prominent figures including John Seddon (he of the ‘systems thinking’ approach), have already questioned the initiative. His open letter to IDS is here  I have more faith in John than "Iain Duncan Cough" (as Lord Gnome called him).

As you might have read in this month’s Housing Technology magazines article, "Welfare reform - Taking Credit where its due", which I was invited to take part in, I have strong feelings about it.  Download it here  it starts on page sixteen.

I don’t think it’s all bad however. I believe that the benefits system is a safety net provided by a fair and just society, it should not become a way of life. All my life I have been in employment and paid eye-watering amounts of taxes to support this and still do. Having seen systems in a number of countries around the world, imperfect as it is, this one is relatively good on the whole. A simplification should be a good thing. People like ‘simple’ don’t they?

Many of the changes that will have most effect on residents are the new way benefits will be received. Monthly not weekly rings alarm bells straight away. What percentage of poorer or aged residents now can navigate even through a week without the temptation of a ‘payday’ or loadshark loan? Many moons back I remember my teenage experience on suddenly moving from weekly to monthly pay. Even being money savvy, that s a big change. Even bigger is the way HB will be rolled up in that payment and will go straight to the claimant. I find it unlikely that the proportion that keeps the roof ever their head will be ring fenced in the family budget somehow.

Spookily enough so do thirty low-income households interviewed by Ipsos Mori this last week 17th September 2012, as reported in Inside Housing magazine. See this link to read the Inside Housing article.

‘This laissez-faire approach will create real problems not only for families themselves, but also for public service organisations, such as social landlords and childcare providers, that families will end up owing money to,’ he said.

The report notes the changes to housing benefit payments are also likely create ‘significant problems’ for social landlords, and could damage their credit ratings as their income would be seen as less stable.
It states: ‘The result would be that housing associations would have to pay more to borrow money, with knock-on implications for the building of affordable housing and new dwellings.’
A further angle on it from the Spectator Blog this week too here.

So what should RSL’s and Housing Groups be doing to prepare before October 2013 for this? Can IT and housing systems help? Most certainly your existing systems can help. I am sure there are few silver bullets to assist in this, however, don’t put faith in a great dashboard that for £20K can ‘drive insight into your resident arrears...’ or similar.

In my experience I have recently done work with a number of organisations who are only just tightening up the way their arrears procedures are married up with rent accounting and financial systems. Many are only just implementing workflow and (what I might term ‘smart’) arrears processing, including initial signup inductions. If your organisation does not use automated arrears or workflow in your systems, or maybe just in a cursory manner, it needs to be analysed and smartened up sharpish.

Auto arrears and particularly workflow is often left to phase 99 in a new HMS project. This is because its generally tricky, needs much involvement from the rents and management in a project team or capabilities were perhaps oversold in the first instance. Often too, solutions should span more than on system and supplier, so your prime provider will struggle to provide the best for you. In an internal project with one or more module ‘champions’, possibly utilising an outside consultant to inject new ideas and techniques and also engaging your suppliers too, you will stand a chance to drive improvements.

Signup and also annual tenant reviews are an ideal time to educate residents, link them with local credit unions, basic bank accounts and drive the move to a higher proportion of payments, in order to access HB via direct debit. If you are not already on AUDDIS, get on it either via your housing management system (if it supports it) or a supplier such as Bottomline . Closer relationships with residents will be needed, so your CRM module needs to be up to scratch, detailing all intercourse back and forth with your organisation. Consider opening up access to all your staff to CRM. Costs can be high, be sure to explore licensing models, often a ‘lite’ user licence can be available at reduced cost.Check you are leveraging all your communication options too, email, SMS TXT, autodailers, preferred languages, twitter, facebook etc.

Keep an eye too on how well your asset management system integrates. With the bedroom tax coming, that needs a serious consideration on bedroom / permitted person data. One for a future blogpost methinks!

Also don’t forget the economic times we are currently in.  Apart from whoever has got the gig to write the core system for the DWP, possibly usual suspects; Accenture and IBM, most suppliers keen for a deal can these days be more flexible on price. Don’t forget to ask for yours!


Many things are already universal.


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

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