Daniel Harrison, co-founder and head of technology at Voicescape
Voicescape has launched a unique tenant engagement solution for social landlords and local authorities, representing a major step change in the intelligent automation of rent arrears management.
Caseload Manager (CM) has been developed by the specialist software business to enable social landlords to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of income recovery.
It combines Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Science and Behavioural Insight (Bi), to identify individual tenant behaviours and risks, automating each stage of the arrears management process. It then applies learning algorithms to accurately predict future customer behaviour, continuously improving operations over time.
Daniel Harrison, co-founder and head of technology at Voicescape, said: “Never before have customer engagement and operational efficiency been more important in helping social landlords to tackle growing income deficits. The sector is facing challenges that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, stretching financial and resource pressures further than ever, and placing demands on organisations to support tenants with the rising cost of living.
“With rents predicted to rise by as much as 4.1 per cent from April 2022, it’s a critical time for social landlords to be able to engage meaningfully with tenants to create successful outcomes for everyone. For the first time, social housing managers can realise the true value of the data they possess, big or small, allowing teams to manage rent arrears more effectively, at a lower cost, and with an improved tenant experience,” he added.
CM is designed to work with all major Housing Management Systems (HMSs) and in-house developed IT support systems, addressing the entirety of the arrears pool in one solution. It does not require additional modules should the landlord wish to tackle Former Tenant Arrears, for example.
Daniel added: “It doesn’t sit in isolation from the rest of the arrears ecosystem. It brings together critical and salient information in one place. By intelligently profiling risk and then taking active intervention, Caseload Manager reduces the generation of new caseload and resulting volume of active cases, saving hours of manual work.”
The CM solution has been developed in partnership with Thirteen, which provides housing services to more than 70,000 customers across Yorkshire, Teesside and the North East.
Chris Marshall, head of housing services at Thirteen, explained: “We’ve all seen the challenges of debt recovery through the pandemic and what we’re seeing now is the cost of living really starting to have an impact, particularly for low income customers that sit just above the housing benefit threshold. As an organisation our ambition is to use behavioural science to intervene at the right time, with the right message, as well as increasing our use of automation to free up our colleagues’ time to be able to spend with customers.
“Caseload Manager not only aligns with the values of our organisation to deliver automation driven by behavioural science, it’s helped us to deliver support to customers when they most need it, and uses all of the intelligence we have on our customers to help us be smarter in our interventions. It’s supported our co-ordinators to manage debt cases in one clear dashboard to streamline processes and reduce the volume of manual intervention required. We’ve already seen, in a relatively short space of time, the benefits of how the system continues to learn from the action that we take and the behaviour of our customers to refine those interventions.”
Using a unique combination of automation technology, behavioural insights and data science, Voicescape creates bespoke communication solutions that help public service organisations drive substantial operational efficiencies and service-level improvements.
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