Intelligent Automation Helps Together Prevent Tenants from Getting Into Debt

Together Housing invested in Intelligent Automation in 2020 to help them manage the growing number, and complexity, of Universal Credit cases. They wanted to help ensure that the income team had time to support tenants and complete their workload.

Together had been used RentSense since 2017, and once Intelligent Automation was used in conjunction it helped create more capacity within the team, and their caseload has continually decreased, despite the environment becoming more challenging.

“Automation has helped us free up staff time for quality conversations, whilst also helping us trigger positive responses from customers who receive automated contact. We see regular heartbeat patterns of customer engagement and payments on our website when automated messages have been sent,” explains Together’s Head of Income, Jackie Tagg.

As cost of living crisis continues impacts, Intelligent Automation has helped ensure the income team are able to complete their weekly caseload and as a result all tenants get the support required. What’s more, since 2020 income officer caseload has dropped from around 5,500 to circa 3,000.

The automation has helped tenants in a variety of ways. The most important is that fewer customers are getting into serious debt, and we can intervene at the earliest stages of debt. This ability runs through the whole process, and no cases (such as low priority) get left.

Jackie Tagg, Head of Income, Together Housing

“It has helped us get speak with customers at critical times and driven personal contact, such as pre-NOSP and pre-court, helping us improve tenancy sustainability, ” continues Jackie.

“Through automation customers have access when they want it, and we are seeing more people using our website as they have the opportunity for better digital access. We see this reflected in high engagement online after automated messages have been sent.” Comments Jackie.