We recently finished a range of projects that have helped to improve the way we deliver our services. We wanted to take the time to share this great news and recognise the effort that has been made to improve these three key areas. All these improvements mean that we function more efficiently as an organisation, which feeds into better services for all our customers.

Adaptations

A number of changes have improved the way we make adaptations for our customers. We've managed to improve:

  • The turnarounds times for our adaptations
  • How we manage our contractors
  • Our reporting systems - allowing us to be more proactive
  • How we handle customer feedback.

All this together has meant we can carry out adaptations in a much better way. Our lead on adaptations, Clare Martin, sees first-hand how this has improved lives for our customers:

“It is very rewarding to be able to provide facilities in a customer’s home which have a significant impact on improving their day-to-day life. Attending to their requests in such a modern way demonstrates our commitment to providing great homes to our customers with disabilities. Defined roles and responsibility, improved turnaround times, and streamlined internal processes allow us to provide a personal service, and effectively manage communication and expectations.”

Income recovery

As one of our key areas, income recovery is fundamental in making sure we are financially viable as an organisation. Thanks to new systems that automate the initial stages of arrears, our Relationship Specialists now have time to focus their attention on helping those customers who need greater levels of support.

We’ve also greatly improved our automated reporting systems which our teams utilise for performance monitoring as well as designing our own in-house case management reporting tool (dubbed ‘Spotlight’) which will allow the team to identify patterns and give themselves the intelligence they need to identify priorities quickly and efficiently.

Matthew Hedges, our Head of Relationships has been the driving force behind this project, and in his eyes:

“It’s been the single biggest technology influence on bringing down our arrears, and when you combine it with the hard work of our amazing team, it’s helped to reduce arrears by around £200,000!”

Geographic information system

Thanks to our new geographic information system (GIS), teams across Red Kite can access a whole host of data via digital maps. Things like physical data on the location of our homes, street lamps, trees, the land we look after, and flood plains. We can use these maps to identify changing service trends and identify hotspots – places with a high number of repairs, antisocial behaviour reports or complaints per home. We can then look at what’s causing these trends and improve our communities even more.

According to Daniel Juraszek, leader of the GIS project:

“GIS is an amazing tool that saves time and money for our customers."

It makes things easier for our Relationship Advisors too. Liam Marshall, one of our Relationship Advisors who regularly uses the tool, thinks:

“GIS makes calls clearer – it gives us immediate access to information that we would have previously had to approach other people for.”

As well as these great improvements, our Programme Board noted the savings that were being achieved through some of our projects: Improvements to our IT infrastructure alone have saved £100,000 on capital costs, and telephony improvements have saved £130,000 per year on running costs. This all means we have more money to invest back in our communities and improve our homes for the people who live in them.