Christlan Action Housing is a community based housing association operating in four North London boroughs - Enfleld, Barnet, Harlngey and Waltham Forest.

CAH owns and manages more than 1100 homes. Their portfolio includes affordable rental family housing for single people, young people, key worker housing and retirement accommodation.

It has adopted the National Housing Federation’s major national initiative that aims to  place Housing Associations at the heart of towns, villages and cities across England - providing homes, neighbourhood services and a better quality of life for local people.

Christian Action is an influential member of the Enfield Strategic Partnership, which works with statutory, voluntary and private sector organisations to seek to improve the quality of life for everybody living in the Borough of Enfield.

A key objective of the Strategic Partnership is to make Enfield one of the best place in which to live, work, study and do business. Christian Action Housing certainly ascribes to this aim.

Challenge

Christian Action Housing, one of North London’s leading housing associations, awaited its impending annual inspection from the Audit Office, the Government body responsible for assessing the quality of services provided by Registered Social Londlords. The outcome of the audit would be instrumental in determining the level of budget granted to assist with the sustainable growth of the organization. Audits focus predominately on customer care and as over 70% of interaction with clients is via the phone it was the principle area of concern. Factual information on call duration, missed/lost calls, response time, call waiting duration and peak times was of critical importance in perfecting CAH’s service to its clients. As Maggie Morrison, Christian Action’s Office Services Manager, stated “We needed to be able to demonstrate that we could communicate efficiently and effectively with our clients and our staff, whether on or off-site. At first glance  an Association’s communications system might not seem high on the agenda of requirements for the audit. However it is all about customer care and is of paramount importance to the audit.” As important was the fact that, due to increasing local development, the power supply in the area was renowned for failing. The most recent failure had lasted 6 hours and the recovery of total functionality and voicemail had taken several weeks.

Solution

In order to ensure peak functionality of telephone based customer care, Marcom had to cover prime aspects of Christian Action’s communications system. It was essential to tackle elements such as peak call times and longest duration of waiting calls, as well as lost calls. The new telecommunications system would incorporate call logging and call recording. This would enable Christian Action to monitor and evaluate its performance, allowing any problems to be pinpointed and eliminated quickly.

To establish this Marcom proposed the installation of call logging software to monitor and assess call traffic in real time facility. This would in turn allow the creation and programming of a suitable call waiting option for incoming calls, allowing the tenants the  option of continuing to wait or leave a message. The call recorder would work in tandem with the call logger to ensure that, should the need arise to refer to a conversation that took place between tenant and staff – it would be readily available.

Concerning the question of failure of power supply, Marcom proposed the installation of an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). A conventional 2, 4 or 6 hour backup would not be suitable. Marcom commissioned and installed a bespoke UPS with 24 hour backup. This had sufficient resilience to overcome futher local power failures.

Results

The new system, the reliable information it supplied and the security of the uninterrupted power supply enabled the Association to provide a consistent level of service. This quality control was one of the points that were instrumental in the Audit Commission Inspectors rating Christian Action Housing as a two star, with promising prospects, status Housing Association. Maggie Morrison is of the opinion that…

"Had we decided against implementing the latest Siemens telecommunications equipment from Marcom, the result of the audit might have been very different. It gave us the detailed reporting and monitoring information necessary to enhance our performance. We thank Marcom Communications for their first class intuitive guidance through this process, and would certainly recommend them to any other Housing Association."