Broadacres Housing Association Streamlines Communication Tools with Vonage Integrated Solutions
Founded in 1993, Broadacres Housing Association is a not-for-profit housing association based in Northallerton in North Yorkshire, UK. Broadacres owns and manages around 6,800 homes and provides a range of services to its customers, all aimed at meeting their vision “to be the best rural housing association in the country.” From home repairs to supported housing, Broadacres strives to ensure customers not only receive first-class service, but that they are proud to say they live in a Broadacres home.
Challenge
Broadacres Housing Association relied on an on-premises only solution, but given the shift to remote and hybrid work, they needed a cloud-based, reliable solution that allowed for remote and hybrid work environment.
Solution
Vonage Fusion: Vonage Business Communications + Teams, Vonage Contact Center integrated with Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice
Results
360-degree customer view enables personalized service; seamless connection between front and back-office enables Broadacres the ability to easily transfer calls to colleagues as the system shows their Microsoft Teams presence; simple enhancements like providing callers their position in the queue have significantly reduced call abandonment ratesLike many organizations looking to enable more flexibility for remote and hybrid options for employees, Broadacres needed to transition from an on-premises-only contact center solution to a cloud-based solution and was looking to invest in more streamlined digital solutions. Putting customers at the heart of decision making, Broadacres wanted to ensure the new solution would continue to enhance its customer experience.
Addressing the Challenges in Housing Support
The contact center is the main point of contact for Broadacres’ customers and an important tool for enhancing customer experience. Once Broadacres colleagues began transitioning to hybrid and remote work, the reliability and agility of the on-premises solution was not up to Broadacres’ quality and standards for the type of experience they wanted to give customers.
Said Mark Birch, CTO, Broadacres Housing. “As long as our advisors could deliver the services needed to our customers, agile working offered a greater work life balance. Unfortunately, our on-premises solution was proving to be less reliable and stable in the hybrid/remote environment, so we didn’t want to continue that investment. Instead, we wanted to move to a cloud-based solution that was not only more reliable and flexible, but could leverage our Salesforce investment. Additionally, we have Microsoft Teams as part of our telephony solution, so we were also looking for a provider that could include that full integration of the capabilities we relied on.”
“We wanted to find a truly integrated single solution to implement and support. We went out to market to view solutions from other suppliers, and they would show Salesforce as an extra they could integrate, but in reality, it was not true integration.”
Birch continued, “When I saw Vonage’s contact center demo at a housing convention, which included the AI-powered Service Cloud Voice. Seeing that automation and the Vonage demo in action, I was confident it was the contact center solution Broadacres needed to provide an enhanced customer experience while providing our agents with the technology they needed to work in a remote and hybrid environment.”
Digital Transformation to Personalize Service
“We implemented Vonage Contact Center on its own over the web. Vonage guided us in the implementation, making sure we got the right call flows for us, and helped us make any tweaks and changes needed once we went live. The flexibility really helped.”
Said Birch, “The added capabilities of Vonage Business Communications, Vonage Contact Center and Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice all working together really helps us focus on the customer experience with a 360-degree view. Simple changes like call position announcements, which lets the customer know where they are in the call queue, has helped reduce abandonment rates. The computer telephony integration, or CTI, gives us call data visibility that allows for a more personalised customer experience.”
“Features such as full call transcription allows our agents to focus on the caller rather than on capturing notes. Having a caller’s data available for our agents ahead of the call has allowed us to diffuse sometimes tense situations more easily. None of that would be possible without the Vonage platform.” Added Birch.
Discover how Vonage Fusion, which combines unified communications and contact center solutions, can transform how your business communicates and operates from the office or anywhere, providing enormous flexibility, ensuring business continuity and enhancing customer engagement.
