7 first steps to a single view of the customer for housing associations and local authorities

Almost all customer facing organisations strive to deliver better experiences for their customers, and with Councils and Housing associations this is no exception. One of the first challenges were faced with is getting the basics right which often is timely, sensitive and relevant communication with a customer on a particular topic whether it be scheduling a repair or even perhaps handling a sensitive complaint.

In order to get the communication right first time and drive that better experience as well as build Platform for differentiation, it is imperative that colleagues i.e., Customer care teams and Housing Operations etc. are empowered with a view of their customers data so that they have the information at their fingertips to achieve excellence in communication. So how do we start the process of gaining a single customer view?:

1.??????Form a working group and agree the barriers

A ‘centre of excellence’ needs to be formed which will combine key stakeholders from your business and IT teams. It’s important to get representation and business champions from each department that have a critical influence on the customer journey, and then from an IT perspective to enable the business to deliver the service.

Then, it’s time to ask yourself, “what are the barriers”? Whether its legacy systems, poor API’s, poor data quality, or a mixture of things; you need to understand the obstacles before you try to get around them.

2.??????Know your people and processes

As well as understanding your barriers, its imperative that your working group has taken the time to establish, document, and share the ‘as-is’ business processes and take the time to model where efficiencies can be gained - challenging the ‘why’ to form the proposed ‘to-be’ processes.

In any transformational change, its important the target audience understands not just the use of new systems, but the processes, ways of working, and why changes are being put in place to make their life easier and the customers experience greater. We call this ‘people and process change management’, and getting this right really is key to the success of a transformation.

3.??????Journey based approach

In order to create a single customer view, a key pre-requisite is to take a journey-based view of customer interactions. By thinking in terms of end-to-end customer journeys that span multiple channels, rather than isolated touchpoints, you can start to put together the pieces required to solve the single customer view puzzle.

Focusing on customer experience involves treating each interaction as part of a cohesive whole, taking into account the customer’s past history with the company and anticipated future needs. So, if taking a journey-based view of customer experience is so important, why is it not the norm? Because it isn’t easy. As new channels are continuously added, they are usually not integrated with each other and it becomes harder to unify customer data.

Many organisations are a long way away from having integrated channels and a complete customer picture, let alone speaking to them in one voice. The result is fragmented customer experiences that can result in significant time spent on resolving issues, complaints, and even processing frequent requests such as repairs.

4.??????Integrate your customer data

Next, is where action starts to be taken and you are required to start to pull together the customer data available to you from different touchpoints. Customer data and customer touchpoints can take many forms, such as demographics, web behaviour, portal interactions, social media profiles and more.

In the early stages the data may reside in several solutions, for example. your housing management system, repairs solution, finance solution, and call centre solution. The key is to then use methods and create a project to drive a single consolidated view of this data.

This could be done via the traditional method of data integration through extract, transform and load (ETL), which first involves first, standardizing and then loading data into the right tables.

There are also alternative methods such as using Microsoft’s customer insights tool, which is a customer journey management software, supporting a low-code/no-code way of orchestrating data into one place. Tools like customer insights and Crimson’s very own data integration framework (Azure service bus) come with readily available connectors to industry aligned solutions to reduce the time and effort to connect to these third-party solutions.

Often this is seen as a lengthy approach, but it doesn’t have to be. Data pilots can be ran to experiment and prove the process and an iterative approach is often one favoured but the customers we work with today.

5.??????Enable identity matching

Next is to then align the different data pieces that have been collected on an individual customer by recognising that they refer to the same customer. This is the process of customer identity matching.

The goal of identity matching is to join data associated with a specific person across events and sources. This way, if 50 people interacted with your company through three different channels, your data shouldn’t look make it look like 150 interactions from 150 different individuals. Tools like Crimson’s Data Integration Framework and Microsoft’s Customer Insights capability can help deliver against these requirements. Typically, data like unique references and ID’s can be used to identity match as well as contact source data.

After a robust identity matching process has been completed, this clean and unified data makes it possible for you to discover your customers’ unique journeys, create dynamic behaviour segments, perform custom analytics and make personalised offers to better serve your customers.

6.??????Deliver the single customer view to your centre of excellence

After integrating your customer data and achieving a single customer view, it is important that your centre of excellence has real-time access to this information, so that they can distribute the analytics and support their business area and customer touch point to deliver a consistently good customer experience.

At every touchpoint throughout the customer journey, think about the difference it would make if customer interaction was contextual based on preferences, channel interaction habits, rents history, ratings, satisfaction scores and other such attributes.

7.??????Analyse services that can be run to benefit the customer

Now you have data at your fingertips, it’s time to act. As per a study by Experian, the successful implementation of a single customer view can have a significant impact, as “three-quarters of all customers would take positive action in response to experiencing the benefits of a single customer view,” including recommending the company if asked (57%), proactively engaging with others to tell them about their experience (45%), leaving a positive review on the company website (26%), and forwarding email offers from the company to family and friends (12%). Achieving a single customer view is a true win-win situation—it works to the advantage of both the customer and the company.

This can be summarised as the following:

Customer/Tenant benefits:

·??????More personalised and timely communications – right place right time interactions

·??????Better service and feeling towards HA/council.

·??????Faster actual resolution times

Organisation Benefits:

·??????Increased customer advocacy and loyalty

·??????Time and cost saved across the association.

·??????More effective and personalised communications impacting an improved customer experience.

·??????Improvements on key service lines - arrears collection, repairs etc.

Next Steps?

For a fully funded 3 Hour Single view of the customer consultancy workshop and more information on how Crimson can help you create a single view of the customer and also support with master data management strategies and the Microsoft technologies (Azure, Dynamics 365, power Platform & Power BI) please get in touch – [email protected] / 07515 922 251??