With rising costs, increased competition in the marketplace and the slow recovery of the economy, businesses can no longer afford to react. Instead they need to be more proactive in managing customer service to meet expectations.
It is no longer enough to react.
Businesses are turning to their frontline staff to improve customer relationship and customer-supplier engagement. This is leading to a shift in their day to day roles. Frontline staff now have the pressures of being proactive, ensuring they deliver bespoke services to meet individual customer needs, implement out of the box ideas, be engaging and impactful to both external partners and customers. By working ahead of a problem before it happens, business’ can save a lot of money, grief and even their reputation as competition is rife and it has become easier than ever for customers to take their business elsewhere.
In order for frontline staff to meet the demands of their customers and employers, sufficient support in training and being given the right tools to do their jobs are equally as important.
Ensuring technology can support you.
There are a plethora of applications, reporting suites and supporting infrastructure for mobile working that can ensure frontline staff spend less time on admin, and more time improving customer satisfaction and delivering proactive service. The difficulty is in finding fit for purpose, flexible solutions to incorporate your own unique business process or workflow and can integrate easily with your core systems to protect your existing investment.
When selecting applications for your business, it is imperative to ensure that your chosen investment is scalable, flexible, provides your team with mobile working facilities and can meet changing demands without worrying about the uncertainties of costs and the ability for your chosen provider to support growth.
Changing Roles of Staff in Social Housing
One of the sectors, being hard pushed to make changes is the Housing Sector. With the new mantra for frontline staff to have a ‘social heart and a business head’, the housing sector requires for its resources to do more with less. External factors continue to change and impact both landlords and tenants.
With welfare reform, universal credit followed by the lack of housing supply, increasing costs and customers expectations, more and more frontline officers are expected to fill the gap.
The Housing Sector has to be more innovative in its approach when selecting technology to support the new challenges they face. Ensuring their investment can allow for staff to do more for less and justifying spending through a Value for Money framework is absolutely necessary with social housing grants being slashed year on year. Where budget cuts seem to be set for the next 5 years, management need to be aware that selecting the right technology platform is crucial in the success of supporting this shift in frontline roles.
At Locality we work with other housing associations to identify these exact challenges.
Have a look at our offerings, and if you feel we could be right for you, then get in touch with us for a free no obligation on-site product demonstration.