Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council manages over 9,000 properties across Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield and surrounding villages. The team appointed Manifest to help configure a Customer Dashboard and to improve the reporting options for the Dashboard.
The challenge
With over 27,000 repair jobs raised every year and an unknown number of customer contacts, good data plays a pivotal role in customer relations. The team was looking to improve relations between staff and tenants by aiding the internal communications process and refining data handling. Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council needed a solution that recorded data centrally and could be accessed immediately in case the appropriate staff were not present at the time of a customer call.
The solution
Manifest worked closely with Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council’s staff to establish their requirements before proposing a solution which allowed faster and more effective customer data collection – avoiding duplicate data entry. Thanks to the guidance of Manifest, the housing teams introduced a Customer Dashboard to effectively handle customer contact.
Annette Benson, Housing System Consultant says, “Manifest took the time to fully understand our requirements. We are not a huge organisation and our budget is limited and although we have been using our Housing Management system effectively for many years, we did not have any way to record customer contact and cases”
“This is the first stage of implementing a customer relations system. Manifest were integral in the deployment and we will be contacting them when we are ready to explore CRM further.” – Annette Benson, Housing System Consultant.
A key part of this deployment was the Dashboard Console – this allowed us to generate on the spot reporting on the volume of calls and our performance which is guiding us in developing KPIs which really help our service to tenants and leaseholders.
The results
The enhanced system means that over 100 staff in the Housing Operations and Housing Property Services Teams at Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council can give accurate information to tenants quickly and efficiently, ultimately improving customer relations.
Annette continues “Identifying key statistics and personnel involved in all of the 48,000 dashboard calls we receive every year has allowed our services to significantly improve. The CRM Management Console paid dividends within the first few weeks it was installed, we are now regularly achieving 95% of calls with a successful response at the first point of contact”.