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Riverside Housing
case study

The Client

Riverside is one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit social housing and regeneration organisations, providing over 76,000 affordable and quality homes from Irvine to Kent.

As a leading provider of supported housing services, particularly for those affected by homelessness, their track record of transforming lives and revitalising neighbourhoods dates back over 90 years. Riverside are committed to delivering impact through innovation and partnership, and offer accessible support to their customers 24/7, 365 days a year.

The Challenge

There was a clear disparity between how Riverside presented their brand values across their contact channels. The key message of their dedication to support, and excellent customer service was apparent in their digital channels. However, the telephony journey, which encompasses a wide range of simple, complex, emotive, and emergency use cases, was more challenging to align to their brand values.

Ensuring telephony messaging is clear, concise and benefit led is important not just for customer understanding and the prioritisation of important calls like; Antisocial behaviour (ASB), Heating and Damp & Mould, but also for ongoing, consistent engagement, helping to reduce frustration and decrease abandonment.

Before our work together, Riverside recognised an opportunity to improve abandonment rates, customer engagement, and call back uptake. They approached us to help them find the most effective solution.

Key Requirements

  • Design a clear, concise and effective caller journey ensuring callers can reach the right areas of business first time, every time

  • Make sure ASB, Heating, and Damp & Mould calls are prioritised

  • Improve abandonment rates

  • Ensure the caller experience is representative of brand values and aligned to other touch points

  • Provide useful and relevant information throughout the caller journey

  • Use the best tone & language for the call type, e.g. empathetic, persuasive, clear, friendly & down to earth

  • Promote and educate callers to the benefits of self-serve / digital deflection through online services, positively affecting future caller behaviour

  • Personalise the in-queue experience to fit the queue type and option chosen, ensuring relevant, appropriate, timely messaging is in place to maximise caller engagement

  • Provide access to the CX Hub allowing for 24/7 recording support

"Premier CX did an excellent job of delivering the project and supported us to create a tone of voice, and messaging style that’s engaging and really brings our brand values to life"

The Solution

We began our project with the Discovery phase, which included in-depth research into the Riverside brand, gaining a deeper understanding of their values, approach to customer support, voice, style, and customer demographics.

We completed discovery workshops allowing our CX team to understand the existing caller journey and challenge historical decisions. This allowed us to paint a picture of the existing experience, identify challenges, limitations, and opportunities for improvement.

Next, we moved to the Creative phase, where we put our understanding of the brand into practice, by creating benefit led, engaging examples through a series of creative workshops. These sessions included key stakeholders, and representatives from the Riverside Customer Voice Executives (RCVE) ensuring that the customer was put first, every step of the way. We showcased an updated script style, new voices and music that represented the brand and the customer.

Following this, we began our Design phase where we created new call flows covering the entire telephony journey, focusing on ensuring ASB, Heating and Damp & Mould calls were prioritised. We created a series of emergency messages for a wide range of potential scenarios, designed a clear and concise call back flow to be offered when wait times exceed 3 minutes, and a series of engaging and relevant queue experiences covering each option.

Finally, we provided audio files for multiple telephony systems, easy to govern call flow designs, master documents containing all the agreed scripts, and a guide containing all the creative decisions made throughout the project, ensuring robust governance and easy ongoing change management.

This coupled with collaboration sessions with Riverside’s CCaS partner, and telephony provider, 8x8, and access to the CX Hub, helped reduce average wait times, increase prioritised call answer rates, decrease abandonment rates, increase the volume of callers utilising the call back service, and improve SLA’s.

The Results

  • An average reduction in abandonment rates of 78%

  • A wait time reduction of on average, 1 minute and 30 seconds

  • A customer service SLA improvement of 13%

  • Prevented an average of 5,785 calls from abandoning

  • 23% of all ASB, Heating and Damp & Mould calls answered

  • Average wait time of 31 seconds for ASB, Heating and Damp & Mould calls

  • 99% of callbacks completed within 1 hour of request

 

“Premier CX were great to work with and did an excellent job of delivering the project, so that it remained both professional and fun. They’ve supported us to create a tone of voice, and messaging style that’s engaging and really brings our brand values to life.

We’re continuing to work with the Premier CX team as we further develop our organisation, including onboarding One Housing Group. As a 24/7 365 contact centre, we’re pleased to have access to their CX Hub which allows us to deploy messaging whenever we need it, helping us to successfully communicate with our customers at any time of day, or night”

Chris Nicholson, Contact Transformation Manager
 Riverside Housing