Blog: Transforming our customer service

Simon Hulbert Head of Customer Response

Transforming our customer service: The Front Door Model

As we fully integrate our two legacy organisations, we’re excited to introduce our Front Door Model. This initiative will combine our existing teams into a single contact point. This is no mean feat as we currently have seven different teams drawn from our legacy organisations – but it’s so much more that that! We are creating a seamless customer service experience, focussed on delivering services at the first point of contact.

To get our design right, we have consulted with our residents about their experience and expectations of our contact centres, and the feedback has been very clear. We have listened to the frustrations of being told that someone else needs to answer the query and that they’ll respond in “x” days. We have also heard about the difficulty of having to contact multiple teams to get answers. In response to this we are reshaping our service around a single front door designed to deliver first contact resolution.

How will we do this?

Giving our residents first contact resolution means changing the way that we work. We are empowering our front line teams to provide more answers and decisions up front with comprehensive training and improved knowledge tools. We are working hard to improve communication channels between our front door teams and the rest of the business to ensure that our advisers can access all the information they need to handle resident’s enquiries. This extensive collaboration is being refined into handshake agreements which set out the actions and decisions that the Front Door teams will take responsibility for.

Of course, we do recognise that our services can be complex and that there will be times when residents need direct access to an expert to resolve their enquiry. Our handshake agreements also set out how calls and enquiries can be seamlessly handed on to specialists.

Aiming High

We’re at the start of the journey, and our goal is to achieve first contact resolution for 80% of all enquires. It’s an ambitious number but we’re up to the challenge and of course, we’ll keep our residents informed on how we’re progressing

From Summer 2025 we will have all seven teams operating on one new Single Omnichannel Contact Centre Platform. This will gain us consistency and efficiency across the board. It will enhance our ability to manage customer interactions across multiple channels and departments. It will also help us to track and monitor our success rate for first contact resolution.

Listening to our residents was this inspiration for this model. And it’s not a one-off process – we’ll continue to listen and seek feedback as we embed this approach.