As an organisation, we recognise that providing innovative digital solutions is key in changing the way we provide our services, improving efficiency and revolutionising our customer experience. That’s why accelerating our digital transformation is one of our key priorities in our Strategic Plan.

In November 2021, we agreed our first Digital Transformation Strategy which describes how we will embrace innovative digital solutions to meet the rapidly evolving and changing needs of our customers and colleagues.

Our digital strategy gives us clear future direction, which recognises the need to continually adapt and evolve as new technology is introduced to the organisation. We encourage our customers, colleagues and partners to be part of our digital journey to help us explore, share and deliver new developments and services.

Our journey so far...

Infrastructure

• We have improved connectivity at several of our schemes, with newer, faster and more reliable broadband connections having been installed at several care schemes.

Innovation

• We’ve launched an innovation channel with our customers where they can submit digital suggestions to us via this form. There have been some great suggestions so far and the submissions have confirmed that we’re on the right track with our digital strategy and work programme.
• Moving forward, we’ll be monitoring these suggestions and continuing to listen closely to our customers and to letting them inform where we put our focus.

Digital customer engagement

• We have implemented several ‘questions of the month’ via our Customer Experience team to gather feedback and input on our digital projects, specifically the development and launch of our new website.
• Customers at our roadshow in summer 2022 also gave us feedback via a survey on how they are currently using digital systems and technology.

A focus on our customers

• We’ve organised a ‘customer touchpoints review’ to understand how our customers are interacting with us at the moment, whether that’s by phone, our website or through our customer app. This has given us some great insight to inform the launch of our new website, ensuring we focus on digitising the things that our customers spend time doing most often.

Digital engagement highlights

We’ve listened to your feedback through our digital ideas channel and we’re pleased that your suggestions align with our digital transformation plans…

What we’re working on at the moment

Care transformation

• We have begun a project to digitise our services across all our care schemes. This will involve upgrading from paper to digital processes through the use of a care planner system, alongside training for all our care colleagues.
• This will help to reduce the time spent on administrative work for our care colleagues, meaning they can spend even more quality time with our customers in our homes or in the community.

Continuing customer engagement

• It’s important to us that the needs of our customers shape our future improvements and projects. That’s why we’re putting together a map of engagement with our customers and looking at ways to evolve this throughout the year.

New website launch

• We are very excited to have launched a brand new website this summer, with a focus on adding more self-service features for our customers.
• The features of our new website mean we are able to offer customers the option to report things like ASB or repairs directly on our website.
• We’re working directly with some of our customers to test the website to ensure we are meeting our customers needs and expectations.
• After the launch, our roadmap will enable us to continue improving the services offered on our website. We will continue to work with our customers and make better use of data to understand areas for future development.

Next steps

Our digital transformation plans for the future

1. Further developments on our new website
   Once our new website is live, in the future we hope to bring even more opportunities for our customers to access self-service functions. This could include the addition of chat bots and a customer portal.
2. Improved data and reporting
   We’re looking to streamline processes for our customers through improved analysis of our data.
3. Improved systems
   We plan to implement improvements to our key housing and assets systems, which will enable us to provide more efficient support to our customers and free up our colleagues’ time to be able to provide added value to our customers.

We’re investing in digital projects that will benefit our customers, improve our efficiency and future-proof our ways of working...