Repairs and Maintenance Case Study

Tenants benefit from Uniclass Enterprise at Newport City Council

“The ROCC Uniclass Enterprise (UE) system using web browser and SQL server, linking to Oracle technologies was the right product at the right time for us. It has enabled us to meet the challenge of delivering a housing repairs service in a modern, seamless and citizen-centred way,” said principal consultant Phil Cox at Newport City Council (NCC).

Cox has a history of working on housing projects; he has been at NCC for 11 years and appreciates the needs of its housing service.

NCC is a unitary authority formed in 1996 and is the eighth largest in Wales, providing all the major services including housing.

Empowering customer facing staff and delivering benefits

Gaining best value for tenants and service providers at the first point of contact with a responsive repairs service involves complex information being presented in an accessible format and in real time. The UE Contact Centre and Appointments system meets this challenge by channelling expert knowledge through leading edge technologies so that repairs requests are accurately logged and enquiries are dealt with efficiently.

Contact centre manager Tony Curliss takes up the story. “Tenants have just one number to ring. The initial call to the City Contact Centre is taken into Newport’s CRM and the address and caller details are entered into the system. The operator selects the service request type for ‘housing repairs’ and confirms with the tenant the property details before UE is launched directly into the property screen, which will show if there are any outstanding jobs. Using the intuitive ‘fault-finder’ within UE, the operator identifies the area of work to be undertaken and, if the tenant wishes, can make an appointment for a tradesperson to visit. Once the initial repairs detail is entered and confirmed, the record is available for the Housing back office team to release the job to the workforce or assign it to an external contractor.”

City Contact Centre operator using the Uniclass Enterprise system to identify the area of work to be undertaken

Housing Operations perspective

Housing operations manager Tony Hawrot is responsible for NCC’s three area housing offices located central, east and west of the city. These employ 60 operatives directly who undertake 70% of the work, the remainder being outsourced to contractors. He thinks that the UE system has certainly impacted on the way he and his area managers run the business and how the staff work.

“It is has made us more focused resulting in a stronger management team and our goals are clearly defined.”

With 20 years experience in housing, area manager Simon Deneen is responsible for the west of city office, 20 operatives and just fewer than 3000 properties are under his control.

“My area of responsibility covers the UE installation here, managing the response service, budgetary control and the area-based operatives. UE has provided me with a business tool to run the day-to-day operation resulting in optimum productivity from the operatives enabling me to meet my performance targets.”

Electronic service delivery for housing repairs

Cox was very much involved in the corporate CRM and UE projects. For the latter, housing systems administrators Glynis Davies and Christina Dunlop were key members of the team.

As part of the move to electronic service delivery, Cox and the project team identified that a major front line service should be housing repairs.

NCC has a register of just under 10,000 council housing stock plus 3000 garages. The council recently divested itself of its 600 prefabrication homes to a new housing trust for redevelopment but, at present, it still maintains the residual properties.

“It was around this time,” said Cox “that ROCC had started to develop Uniclass Enterprise and we were invited to become one of the developing partners with three other local authorities.”

After stringently testing the housing repairs data to ensure a smooth transition from the existing ROCC system to UE Contact Centre and Appointments system it went live last October.

Project team perspective

Pictured in the City Contact Centre are l to r: Phil Cox – principal consultant; Christina Dunlop and Glynis Davies – housing systems administrators; Tony Hawrot – housing operations manager and Simon Deneen – area manager

“From the feedback we received, staff have said that UE is far more user-friendly, it is faster and easy to use. Certainly, we have found that staff can be trained quickly and effortlessly,” said Davies.

Dunlop commented: “The interface between Housing Operations and the tenants has improved. We raise over 45,000 response orders a year and the time in placing an order has been cut in half. Making appointments for trades people to visit is much quicker and we are simply delivering to our tenants an all round better service.”

In conclusion Cox commented: “We have in place a well-informed and effective contact centre offering an exceptionally visible service to the tenants. Equally, our Housing Operations deliver a responsive service to the tenants and maintain our housing stock to a very high standard.“