Our focus for the next year: one organisation by April

Our focus for the next year: one organisation by April 2022

One contact centre, one telephone number

By early April 2022, we will have merged our two contact centres – the former Equity Customer Solutions team and Great Places’ current Customer Hub - enabling our customers to make easier contact with our multi-skilled team of customer contact specialists using one single telephone number and a range of digital channels.

Where possible we will continue to prioritise resolving your enquiries at this first point of contact, ably assisted by Chatabot, our friendly digital assistant available 24/7 on the home page of our website.

Delivering a better customer service

In April 2022 we will be launching our single biggest project within the programme. Aareon QL is a powerful new housing management system bringing together the functions of the existing Great Places and Equity systems into a single, more effective system.

A hugely exciting outcome of this project will be the roll-out of a whole new suite of mobile and digital products for Great Places customers:

• All information relating to customers’ tenancies and property details will sit in on our new tenancy app, enabling us to provide you with more concise information the first time you contact us.
• 1st Touch is Aareon’s mobile and digital solution. It provides our neighbourhood officers with customer information ‘on the go’. This allows us to resolve any queries you might have, such as how to log on to the portal, face-to-face there and then, rather than directing you to our contact centre.
• The self-service customer portal (with a customer app to follow later in the year) will provide access to the most frequently used services - to check your balance, review your transactions, request a refund, a link to Allpay and most significantly, the ability to log and appoint to arrange your own repairs. *Former Equity customers will have the functionality to log repairs from August 2022.

Streamlining our neighbourhood management operations

Great Places and Equity share a similar geographical footprint with our properties situated close to one another. A key part of our integration plan is to bring our housing management operations and teams together from April so that customers receive the same levels of service.

We have also created more streamlined patches of properties for each Neighbourhood Services Manager so some customers will have a new point of contact for their property from April. We will be writing to customers nearer the time to advise what these changes will mean to you.

Streamlining our operations to create more efficient, smaller geographical patches in this way will allow Neighbourhood Services Managers to spend more time working with customers on their patches and less time travelling. We will also be able to develop closer relationships with other service providers to help make a greater local impact.