How Hostcomm’s Remote Visual Experience (RVX) service is driving efficiencies in the UK Social Housing Sector
The social housing sector has faced a number of unique and incredibly difficult challenges over the last few years. COVID meant the sector had to find ways to continue to service its tenants while maintaining social distancing requirements with limited resources. It had been hoped the end of restrictions would mean a chance to return to normal, but the cost-of-living crisis has squeezed budgets and pushed the social housing sector to continue to seek new ways to deliver their services more efficiently and effectively. Read on to discover how remote visual experience (RVX) technology can help deliver better services while offering opportunities to reduce costs.
COVID, and the lockdowns that resulted, meant that the social housing sector had to try to find ways to help tenants remotely solve issues that would have usually done through visiting the premises of the tenant – There was an absolute necessity to both protect the tenant and the housing sector’s staff from the possibly of transmission of the virus through reducing interaction opportunities. Obviously, carrying out a repair or ensuring that appliances were meeting safety standards was an extremely difficult task to achieve remotely, leaving the social housing sector with an incredible challenge.
Hostcomm has helped its social housing clients overcome these challenges through its remote visual experience (RVX) software solution. RVX software allows an agent in your customer service centre to, after permission, take over the camera of the customer’s smartphone, see what the customer is seeing, annotate on the screen, and then guide the customer to solve simple issues or to gather more information to ensure a problem can be solved first time if a visit is required. For example, it might well be that a boiler simply needs to be reset but the tenant is having problems locating the right switch, something the more experienced agent can guide the tenant to accomplish. Equally, in the case that a repair to the boiler must happen, the agent can accurately get the right serial number or assess the right part, so that only one visit to the premise is necessary.
While COVID social distancing concerns may have ended, the efficiencies provided by RVX software are still incredibly compelling. At the very least the ability to solve tenant issues first time and to reduce field visits, gives social housing providers a chance to improve their general operational effectiveness. However, the recent rise in the cost of fuel and inflationary pressure has meant there is a real need to be innovative to keep costs down.
RVX technology helps social housing providers in the following additional ways:
- By being more efficient, it means a problem can be solved faster increasing customer satisfaction
- Quicker assessment of a problem means you can help more tenants with limited resources
- The resolution of simple issues over the phone without the need to visit a property
- Carrying out inspections without having to enter a property, reduces anxiety around meeting face-to-face
- Ensure the right contractor is booked and that they can take the right part with them to make sure they only need to visit a tenant once
- The opportunity to make a video recording of an inspection or problem resolution makes it much easier to then train staff and create best practice in your organisation
- When a problem is more complex than expected, contractors can conference in more experienced team members to make sure it was solved on that first visit.
Hostcomm’s clients in the social housing sector include Peabody, Ongo, Worthing Homes, and Grove Housing. In the case of Grove Housing, their implementation of RVX and the subsequent manner in which they were able to continue to provide service while protecting their tenants was recognised by the All-Ireland Housing Awards 2022 in the Excellence in Housing Innovation category.
Hostcomm’s RVX solution includes a number of customised administration features to make it easier for staff all across your business to utilise the software and to share knowledge with the wider team:
- Quick surveys & problem resolution with enhanced visual tools for confusion-free experience
- Automated inspection document production
- Advanced logging / archiving of problems with AI intelligent searching.
In addition, Hostcomm is always working on their solution with the following features due to be released soon:
- Scripted, in session host guidance tool. This is similar to an intelligent online survey form built into the host RVX interface so that they can follow a procedure with forgetting or making mistakes eg during a void survey. It has the intelligence to force specifics tasks.
- Multi-lingual real-time chat to assist with client communications
- Computer Vision document capture uses AI to capture a document, and ingest it directly into a backend system, retaining formatting, host literally capture it with remote smartphone camera and the RVX system does the rest.
