Chatbots: Can They Help The Housing Sector?
Ed Yau – Solution Architect, cloudThing
Chatbots make it easier to engage with customers by removing barriers to services
Many organisations, including those in Housing Sector, are interested in Chatbots.
They make it easier to engage with customers by removing barriers to their services, there’s no App install required and if someone knows how to use Facebook messenger, then they know how to use your bot….
Many in the Housing Sector are interested in Chatbots as they make it easier to engage with customers by remove barriers to their services.
As always though, with such a new solution it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and assume that a chatbot is the best and only delivery route for everything.
There are specific ways Chatbots could offer real value to the Housing Sector but only by examining the customers it would serve can we understand the unique business opportunities and challenges presented by them.
A good place to start would be to understand what a Chatbot is naturally good at and where we can use existing frameworks to speed up the development of a solution.
Pro Tip: Be wary of the Wix-type chatbot makers if you want to create a bot that will scale with the needs of your organisation!
Some tasks will be quick and easy to complete by a Chatbot; whereas more complex requests may need some assistance from the existing contact centre team to complete them correctly and thoroughly.
This doesn’t mean that Chatbots shouldn’t feature in the process; a common mistake is to assume that the Chatbot is the whole solution; often it’s simply adding a more efficient way for customers to access/process information that already exists.
Another advantage is that Chatbots are available 24/7, which makes the tenant/customer feel that there’s someone they can contact at all times, ultimately providing comfort and security that they don’t have to wait until working hours to raise a concern.
Why The Housing Sector?
We’ve discussed the needs of the Housing Sector in previous blogs but to summarise, the IT department should, at all times, be working with the business to:
- Lower costs
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Ensure that services are optimised
With challenges to lower rent by 1% year on year and the rollout of universal credit; using technology to increase the efficiency services and lower costs should be at the forefront of an IT departments priorities.
Chatbots can help here by speeding up the route to information and solutions for tenants/customers and enabling contact centre staff to focus on more high priority cases.
One of the problems that social landlords face is that there are too many incoming enquiries to solve across multiple channels; such as the subjects of:
- Rent
- Repairs
- Emergency help (for broken boilers etc)
- Complaints
Without a Chatbot, all these questions need to be answered by a member of staff in the contact centre either on by phone, social media or webchat.
A Chatbot is a great tool for dealing with the typical ‘FAQ’ enquiries across multiple channels, while your contact centre staff can deal with more intricate requests.
A bot can shield your contact centre from being high volumes, whilst being able to handle enquiries from across Facebook messenger, webchat or even a digital speaker in a tenant’s home, to ensure the simple enquiries are dealt with from end-to-end by the bot while the more demanding enquiries are handed to an experienced contact centre agent.
Another clear benefit is a bot can carry on working for you out of normal business hours. This translates into better productivity and an improved service from your organisation
However, Chatbots can be put to work in more targeted situations as well as a reactive point of contact approach. With the need to keep on top of customers who may be late with rent payments, an automated chatbot could be triggered to reach out if rent was late: making first contact to triage why rent is delayed and alert a member of staff if further action needs to be taken.
A Focus On Business Value
The key to delivering value to housing through a Chatbot is to not overcomplicate its design just to show off what technology can do.
Focusing on the genuine business problems within Housing and solving it with an intuitive Chatbot is better than building a very complicated approach for a problem that does not need solving.
Sometimes less is more and most tenants are happy to talk to a bot if the conversation feels natural and they feel it is going to speed up the service, even if there are still a few things that the bot needs to redirect to a human.
When the user experience has been well-designed and thought through, any solution that uses familiar technology and removes barriers is going to be quickly adopted by end users.
This becomes especially effective when we blend the bot into existing contact centre processes by allowing operators to jump in when required to deal with complicated queries.
A simple user experience that works across multiple channels for housing customers will attract more customers than a complicated one.
To ensure we keep it simple, a bot that focuses on quickly providing the information required in natural language, or handing off to a member of staff will not require any prior knowledge from the customer, or a great deal of technical know-how to interact with it. If you end up with a web of complex loops and hooks in you bot conversation experience, the chances are you’re going to lose your users along the way.
If you notice the Conversation Flow getting complicated, much like with code, you may find it easier to draw a box around that section of the bot and treat it as a separate bot in it’s own right, redirect from the bot to your webpage or escalate to a human operator.
Whether it’s paying rent, or reporting a repair, or raising a complaint Housing Associations want their customers to be able to complete these tasks with ease and efficiency and not have the bot make the process made any more rigid or complicated than it would otherwise be.