Award demonstrates Flagship’s digital transformation

Flagship Group has demonstrated its commitment to digital transformation and drive towards a paperless environment by winning the ‘Best Customer Experience’ award at last night’s national Public Sector Paperless Awards 2017.

In the last year, the housing provider has made a significant step to change the way they engage with customers and how customers can engage with its business. Flagship has focused on a number of specific areas including tenant involvement.

In the past, it has been challenging to derive real customer insight from tenant groups and understand what truly mattered to customers. As a result, a new small, skill based focus group of customers (COG) was created to work closely with the Board of Directors to identify areas of concern, scrutinise services that impact customers and influence decisions. A bespoke Customer App was also designed enabling COG to feed their views and opinions directly into the heart of the organisation. All paper was eradicated and with the click of a button the customer group can now help the business understand what matters to all customers from the comfort of their own homes.

For the wider customer base, an online portal called “The Platform” was created for customers to share their views and opinions on service related topics by completing digital surveys to inform the business.

These changes have made a variety of savings on customer engagement methods totaling more than £80,000.

Other positive changes made by Flagship include:
• Live chat – enabling several chats to be managed at any one time in the contact centre quickly efficiently at no cost to the business.
• Call me back – a service that allows our customers to request a call back and retain their place in the queue.
• Log my repair – first online facility to log repairs removes the requirement for any human interaction and allows customers to log their repairs at any time of the day.
• Call diverts – customers able to request a direct transfer to a member of staff through voice recognition.

All of the changes have enabled Flagship’s contact centre to focus on resolving more in depth customer queries faster and allowed more customers to self-serve.

Director of Housing & Customer Insight at Flagship, Marie-Claire Delbrouque, said: “We are thrilled to have won the award. For some time, we have been conscious that the digital revolution is here to stay and as a result we needed to make sure we kept up with the changing dynamic of interacting with our customers.

“By embedding these involvement channels, times have really changed at Flagship. Customers are able to easily communicate and influence services, give views and opinions on key service and policy changes and operate in a digital world, free of paper with minimal meetings.”