Member Article

AmicusHorizon Improves Customer Experience with Firmstep

AmicusHorizon, one of the largest housing associations in South East England, has transformed its customer services by deploying Firmstep’s Customer Experience Platform, to provide digital services, automate interactions with residents and drive future digital service provisions.

Using Firmstep’s Self and Forms solutions, AmicusHorizon is providing residents with a personalised log-in portal, delivering a single sign-in access point for all customer services. Residents can update their personal details and communication preferences, check repair status’, view rent statements and check payment history online. 30% of residents have signed up for the service since it was launched earlier this year.

Following the initial launch, the association is planning to further extend their digital service offering. Planned future developments to the online portal include repair request, shared ownership applications, applications for additional properties such as garages, and requests for payment cards. Future channel shift projects will be guided by the improved data collected from residents.

Suzanne Adams, Programme Manager at AmicusHorizon said: “We were looking for a secure, reliable and user-friendly way to transact with customers online. Firmstep provided the functionality our existing CMS and CRM systems were lacking. The initial launch of the Firmstep platform has been hugely successful, we’ve seen impressive early adoption rates of 30%, with 64% of those signed-up returning to use the portal. As we start to drive channel shift and offer more services online, we’re confident this will continue to increase.”

Prior to deployment AmicusHorizon held a series of focus groups with their residents to identify the digital services they wanted. The organisation conducted an internal review to identify key tasks and interactions that could be enhanced and streamlined. The Firmstep platform was selected following an extensive tender process. It met all of the association’s specifications, including the functionality to deliver a user friendly platform and integration with existing back-office systems.

Suzanne continued: “When we put out the tender we had a detailed plan of what we wanted to achieve and the customer journey we wanted to deliver. We were impressed by Firmstep’s established platform that had been tried and tested by many local councils. Firmstep’s determination to deliver the project and the knowledge and support they provided, enabled us to complete the build in just eight weeks and under budget.”

Firmstep’s Platform is a suite of solutions developed specifically to accelerate channel shift, make services more accessible, and improve the customer experience. It can be adopted in a modular way, from supporting a single council service, to enabling complete customer service management across all contact channels. With its unique integration capabilities, the Platform links to any organisational back-office system, giving easy, open access to data with no need for complex programming or system changes. This helps councils, local authorities and other organisations to quickly roll out solutions that meet customer service expectations and successfully achieve channel shift.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Joseph Rutter .