Member Article

Stonewater appoints Voicescape to drive housing arrears collections

Leading social housing association, Stonewater, has appointed Voicescape to help increase engagement with tenants and boost income collection performance.

The housing association will implement Voicescape’s innovative Caseload Manager, following a competitive tender for an income analytics solution.

The software business, which provides customer engagement and tenant sustainability solutions for social landlords, will enable Stonewater to maximise operational efficiencies in the management of income collection.

Caseload Manager is a unique tenant engagement solution that enables housing associations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of income recovery. It combines Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science and Behavioural Insight, to identify individual tenant’s preferred behaviours and risks to tailor automated engagements at each stage of the arrears management process.

Stonewater manages 34,500 homes nationwide, with an annual turnover of £225 million. Since 2021, the housing association has worked alongside Voicescape to help manage its income collection, with Caseload Manager strengthening its approach to rent arrears management.

Holly Edwards, Assistant Director of Customer Experience, said: “I’m looking forward to working with Voicescape as part of the introduction of Caseload Manager. With an ever-changing and challenging economic landscape, Stonewater needs to be able to reflect and reimagine how we deliver our services, to ensure we’re providing support to those customers who need us most. Through the use of the software’s AI capability, we hope to take our first steps to ensuring we get that balance right with our customers and are always there.”

By intelligently tracking every tenant’s preferences and risks, and then taking proactive, automated intervention, Caseload Manager minimises the generation of caseloads presented to officers for action, saving hours of manual work. The implementation of Caseload Manager is expected to support more than 50 employees at Stonewater in their day-to-day management of arrears collections.

Peter Hudson, Sales Director at Voicescape, commented: “In the current socio-economic climate, Stonewater, like all social housing providers, is facing significant challenges. With increasing pressure on tenants’ expendable income, due to the cost-of-living crisis, ensuring employees have the tools and capacity to support those tenants who need their help the most is of the utmost importance.

“The aim of implementing Caseload Manager is to ensure Stonewater maximises the utilisation of resources. This will help them to support tenants in prioritising their rent payments as much as possible and, as a result, reduce debt levels. This partnership marks the continuation of Stonewater’s journey towards the adoption of intelligent automation, providing greater integrated digital solutions, while reimagining how services are delivered. We’re delighted to be working with them once again to help realise this vision.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Jones .