A short conversation with Sovereign’s Head of Income, Lizzie Aston-Long, about the challenging environment in which landlords and their tenants find themselves, and how RentSense and Intelligent Automation have helped their income team and tenants.
Mobysoft:
How do officers find using RentSense?
Lizzie Aston-Long: :
RentSense helps officers to prioritize their work and enables them to intervene earlier. It also helps them identify tenants which are in credit, but are at risk of falling into arrears.
The Intelligent Automation reduces their caseload so they can focus their time on the more complex cases. The software helps us to reduce the number of people in debt and those with arrears – and offer help much earlier.
Mobysoft:
How has it helped performance and tenants over the years?
Lizzie Aston-Long: :
RentSense has helped us to improve collection rates and target our intervention. This has meant we can support tenants much earlier and intervene before issues become more problematic.
RentSense allows us to provide a more supportive and tailored customer approach, which focuses on tenants’ wellbeing. It also saves our officers time and allows them to prioritize more effectively.
In the last financial year (ending March 2022) our target for gross arrears was 4.5% of total annual debit for each KPI. However, we achieved 2.59%. When you break this data down further, our arrears target for customers living on Universal Credit was 7%. But we achieved 4.46%. Without RentSense and automation we would have not been able to achieve these results.”
Lizzie Aston-Long, Sovereign
Lizzie Aston-Long:
RentSense allows us to provide a more supportive and tailored customer approach, which focuses on tenants’ wellbeing. It also saves our officers time and allows them to prioritize more effectively.
Mobysoft:
How is the cost of living crisis impacting your tenants and staff?
Lizzie Aston-Long:
At present we have seen the tip of the iceberg. We look to provide a range of support to customers who are struggling and eligible for greater support. We work in partnership with other agencies to provide as much rounded support as possible, from advice on money and debt advice services, to employment and training services, access to digital equipment and a whole lot more.
Mobysoft:
Why did you consider using the automation module with RentSense?
Lizzie Aston-Long:
We are a forward-thinking organisation, and we wanted to maximise our productivity. Repetitive functions should be automated. We knew we needed more capacity within the team so they could focus on more in-depth conversations, as well as ensure all tenants which need to be contacted, are in fact contacted.