In the ever-evolving landscape of the 21st century, one sector that stands at the precipice of significant change is social housing. A recent white paper by Kate Davies, a luminary in the field, titled “Social Housing: Radical Reform Through Better Collaboration, Interdependent Working and Technological Innovation,” provides a comprehensive overview of the current challenges and potential solutions for our critical sector. In this blog I’ll summarise the white paper and identify Microsoft technologies that may be able to help play a part in resolving these issues.
The Current State of Social Housing
The white paper identifies five key issues that are currently plaguing the social housing sector. These include tenant dissatisfaction, political choices and finances, engaging with residents, problems with data, and the current information technology offer. Rooted in a lack of investment, a division between people and buildings, and outdated and incompatible technology systems, these problems pose significant hurdles to the delivery and quality of social housing.
A New Vision for Social Housing
Kate proposes a radical shift in the vision and culture of social housing. She advocates for a concept of home as a place where people live and feel valued. This vision necessitates housing associations to work more closely with residents, adopt an interdependent approach between tenant-facing and property teams, and collaborate across the sector to share learning and resources.
Moreover, Davies underscores the importance of leveraging open data, cloud-native platforms, and intelligent automation to improve decision-making and customer experience. These technological innovations, she argues, could be the key to unlocking a new era of social housing.
This new vision certainly chimed with me and my mission
Delivering solutions that are affordable, innovative and collaborative. Enabling colleagues to deliver a great service and free up funds to build homes.
E&F Solutions
The paper also got me thinking how the Microsoft Ecosystem (mainly the Powerplatform – that includes Powerapps, Power Pages, Dynamics etc) could help make this vision a reality?
Examples of how the Microsoft Power Platform help resolve some of these issues?
Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents, can offer several solutions to the challenges outlined in the white paper. I’ve added example/s under each challenge but to be honest the list could go on and on.
- Tenant Engagement and Satisfaction:
- Virtual Assistant Chatbots: Power Platform’s Power Virtual Agents can be used to build intelligent chatbots that can handle common enquiries, providing instant responses and improving tenant satisfaction. This not only enhances the customer experience but also reduces the workload on customer service teams
- Personalised Services: By leveraging Power BI’s data analytics capabilities, housing associations can gain insights into tenant behaviour and preferences. This data can be used to tailor services to individual needs, thereby improving satisfaction levels
- Communicating with Customers: Lots of options here, but one that stands out is the use of Power Pages. A Portal that can be used by customers to self serve, receive updates on cases, as well as provide the opportunity to own/update their own data.
- Data Management:
- The platform is built on Dataverse provides housing associations the opportunity to use consistent property and customer data all stored in one place but accessed via the rest of the platform. This consistency would enable it to feed into a social housing property database
- Automation and Efficiency:
- The list here is huge, out of the box the platform has a lot to offer, Power Automate can help trigger actions to ensure customers are kept up to date with their queries or the correct property data is updated. I provided a bit more detail in this blog AI Invasion: Will Robots replace your housing officers
- Technological Innovation: Power Platform is a low-code/no-code platform that can transform organisations and enable them to discover new ways to deliver digital services. It is tightly integrated with other Microsoft applications, such as M365, D365, and Azure. With ongoing investment in AI and application updates Microsoft have shown that they will be committed to the Power Platform for some time.
By leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform, housing associations can address the current challenges and transform the social housing sector into one that is more efficient, transparent, and customer-centric. However, the implementation and success of these solutions would require a strategic approach that ensures customers are at the heart of it.
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