Thirteen Group has commissioned technology solutions specialist Avoira to develop a bespoke AI speech analytics platform to strengthen further its commitment to listening to its customers and providing exceptional services.
In addition to automatically scoring calls for quality, this will promote adherence to and evidence of compliance with the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023.
The solution will capture, analyse, transcribe and score nearly 330,000 calls handled annually by the housing association, which owns and manages more than 36,000 homes. It employs 1,500 colleagues and provides homes and services for around 100,000 customers across the North East, Yorkshire and Humber.
Avoira’s solution will be built around the multi-award-winning Xdroid customer experience (CX) application which the company’s CX engineers will train to meet Thirteen’s specific needs. This will see them creating a suite of tags – keywords and phrases – which will be picked up by Xdroid and used to categorise, flag and score calls.
Incorporating this within a risk matrix will enable Thirteen to identify a wide range of customer needs, such as physical and mental health concerns, financial issues and urgent property remediation requests.
Once implemented, it will report the volume of customers with additional needs and confirm for every call whether agents secured the correct outcome. It will also incorporate a risk scoring capability to ensure the customers with additional needs are identified and their issue is appropriately and promptly addressed.
Currently, Thirteen are dependent on manually evaluating the quality of calls, handled at its Touchpoint Service Centre in Middlesbrough and its Touchpoint stores in Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hull and Hartlepool, alongside its ‘mobile touchpoint’, launched last summer.
The project will initially see Avoira’s CX team build on the proven speech recognition and transcription engine, curating it to Thirteen’s customer interactions. It will also draw upon the tech company’s wider experience in both public and private sector contact centre markets.
These include an award-winning project at London Borough of Barking & Dagenham (LBBD) council. This secured benefits that mirror those sought by Thirteen, such as identification of its customers’ additional needs and holistic quality assurance scoring.
The solution will provide Thirteen with a variety of metrics to support compliance and inform best practice in service delivery, with management insights provided through analysis of every call.
Explaining the decision to invest in the sophisticated AI-powered platform, Adele Mclaren, Thirteen’s Head of Touchpoints and Experience said: “Implementation of Xdroid will mark a step change in the way we monitor, score and finesse customer service delivery.
“Ensuring we provide safe and quality homes for our customers is at the forefront of what we do. That means listening to what our current and future customers need.
“Our strategy is focused on customer excellence, and this is what drives our ambitions around how we ensure that the best possible services are delivered to our customers.
“Automating our quality assurance processes will remove the obvious limitations of random call sampling. With every call being assessed we’ll for the first time have a full 360-degree view of Touchpoint service centre operations and standards.
“Crucially, with the roll out of a new regulatory framework under Awaab’s Law, we’ll not only be better able to identify and respond to urgently required property remediations, but evidence our compliance with the new regulations.”
From October Awaab’s Law will require social landlords to resolve damp and mould issues within specific timescales.
Matthew Iball, CX Consultant said that both regulatory and cost pressures are seeing social housing providers look to implement sophisticated analytics solutions.
“Housing associations and Community Interest Companies are facing multiple challenges. As a result, they are looking at how they can use AI and, in particular, sophisticated analytics, to give insight into productivity, service standards and vulnerable customer care.
“The depth and breadth of management insights yielded by an organisation-specific deployment of Xdroid facilitates enhancement of both productivity and service quality.”