A voice for social housing

It’s no surprise that for the last year, housing associations have been considering the role and relevance of their telephony systems to enable them to provide an outstanding customer experience. Traditional communications systems served us well for many years but are being reinvented and reimagined because of the ability of the cloud to transform operational capabilities to satisfy raised customer expectations.

TSG have identified several key trends across housing associations, concerning progressive approaches towards delivering customer service excellence that is built on cloud-hosted unified communications and telephony services.

The search for a permanent solution

The temporary working arrangements that housing associations installed during the first part of 2020 are now being replaced with modern cloud-enabled voice services. This is providing the catalyst for change and a platform for delivering exemplary services for customers and colleagues in the future.

Improving customer satisfaction and employee engagement

The drive to improve customer satisfaction and employee engagement is accelerating the adoption of cloud-hosted telephony services. Customers and colleagues expect to be able to connect with your services at a time that compliments their home and work life balance, and their own personal and professional preferences. Cloud-hosted voice services offer an unparalleled level of availability, reliability, performance and scalability that is simply not achievable with on-premise phone systems.

Voice is becoming increasingly critical to services

As of January 2021, the Institute of Customer Service survey shows that the telephone is the third most popular way of interacting with organisations and that figure has grown by 0.8% in the last 12 months. This underlines the ongoing significance of telephony despite growth in the utilisation of the website, apps and web chat.

Acceleration of cloud adoption

We have seen stiff competition open up and various mergers and acquisitions across cloud-voice providers. This is good news for customers as it starts to consolidate the market, providing focused high-quality solutions that offer both breadth and depth of functional coverage.

Some of the main drivers that are often cited within housing association voice migration strategies are:

Adoption of next generation voice services

After the initial cloud migration to cloud voice services, customers have access to advanced capabilities that are only available with the cloud. With these additional benefits, migrating voice to the cloud is becoming an attractive option, especially for housing associations looking to strengthen their relationships with customers and employees.

Moving from ISDN to telephony in the cloud

Housing associations require futureproofed solutions with minimal capital expenditure and a large amount of flexibility, especially as the world shifts to being more digital-first. With more organisations implementing fully remote or hybrid work forces for the foreseeable future, telephony in the cloud is becoming a favourable option.

The culture change demands flexible communication solutions for remote work

Enlighted employers have extended their geographical reach during recruitment to secure the best talent, even if that talent does not live locally. Work is becoming something you do rather than somewhere you go. As such, employees now generally fit into one of five categories: office based, home office, hybrid, field based or front line. Flexible, modern communications systems are key to keeping a dispersed workforce in touch with each other.