Leading Through Continuous Change in Community Housing
Community Housing is facing continuous change — from growth and regulation to technology, workforce pressures and rising expectations. Join Donnabrook...
INDUSTRY
Nonprofit
HQ
Newcastle, Australia
YEAR FOUNDED
1985
EMPLOYEES
250
“Our staff can access RingCentral from anywhere in the world. We are really looking forward to using RingCentral as a ‘follow the sun’ contact centre if we need to extend our hours of coverage, or to support other versions of international implementation.”
Kent Chalmers
Group Chief Technology Officer, Home in Place
Home in Place is an enterprising and socially committed international NGO that provides social and affordable housing for low to moderate income households.
One of the largest non-government providers of social housing in Australia, Home in Place has more than 7600 properties under management.
With over 35 years’ experience in providing secure and affordable housing, Home in Place has extensive experience in all aspects of tenancy and property management and has successfully operated under a wide range of state and federal government initiatives and housing programs.
Home in Place’s vision is for a world in which all people have access to safe, affordable and adequate housing and are actively engaged in their communities. In pursuit of that goal, Home in Place has developed an approach to service delivery which integrates tenancy and property management within a broader network of services and maximises opportunities for tenants to increase their economic and social participation.
The number one focus area for Home in Place is growth; in terms of geographic expansion, number of properties under management and through diversification of services, including property development, community development, facilities management, and disability housing.
To enable and support that growth, Home in Place has been investing in technology to improve its digital service platforms and capabilities, both for greater customer web-based self-service, and assisting with customers’ digital inclusion.
To date, Home in Place has primarily driven customer service through its 25-agent contact centre, currently handling approximately 11,000 inbound calls per month and 7,000 outbound calls. It also supports customers through face-to-face engagement from 11 office locations in Australia and New Zealand.
“For Home in Place, the last few years has been about us working on our internal systems as a pathway to enable our tenants digitally. We’ve leant into some of our technology vendors to enable us to leverage our data, and from there to assist our tenants to use that data, which is just starting to come to fruition now,” said Kent Chalmers, Group Chief Technology Officer at Home in Place.
However, Home in Place’s ageing, stand-alone telephony platform was reaching end-of-life as well as limiting the organisation’s ability to develop multi-channel capabilities and meet its digital customer service vision.
Choosing RingCentral UCaaS, CCaaS and enterprise support
After seeing a demonstration of RingCentral MVP and RingCentral Contact Centre in late 2021, Home in Place realised it was the ideal solution to meet its future needs.
“The key feature for us is integration,” Mr Chalmers said.
“If we can get our data into our communications systems, that makes things a lot easier not only for our staff, but also to deliver digital services for our tenants in the future.”
Native integration with Home in Place’s Microsoft Teams collaboration platform has enhanced internal communications.
The cloud-based UCaaS and CCaaS platform has also reduced the complexity and administrative burden with regards to compliance with security certification and regulatory requirements, and with the organisation’s business continuity planning (BCP). The RingCentral platform provides Home in Place with a 99.999% uptime SLA, and enterprise-grade security and privacy compliance.
Mr Chalmers estimates that simplifying the communications environment equates to saving one full-time equivalent (FTE) role in his IT team over the next five years – a resource that can be redeployed to focus on digital innovation programs.
In addition to deploying RingCentral, Home in Place has engaged RingCentral Enterprise Support to assist on the technical side with its new UCaaS and CCaaS platform.
Accelerating digital customer service
Phase one of the RingCentral project was replacing and consolidating an ageing telephony and contact centre environment with a single cloud-based platform across Australia and New Zealand.
Phase two will see RingCentral integrated with Home in Place’s CRM and ERP systems, allowing Home in Place to deliver a more rapid and personalised response to customers when they call the contact centre, offer web chat functionality for tenants, support the rollout of digital self-service, and introduce chatbots to answer common questions and provide simple data such as rental balances or payment due dates. Additional contact centre features will be rolled out, including workforce management automation and social channels, skills-based routing, workflow and automation, and advanced features such as intelligent outbound calling and call-back in queue.
RingCentral also makes it possible to support further international expansion and an increasingly decentralised customer service operation.
