Focusing on prevention

Guinness Housing Partnership supports more than 140,000 customers and has used NEC Housing successfully for many years. When it comes to debt, its team of Customer Account Advisers focus on prevention rather than recovery. This means they need the right insight at the earliest possible stage.

Karen Holt is Head of Customer Accounts at Guinness:

“We want to make the right contact at the right time, but we were struggling to get a clear picture of where the need was greatest. Choosing Account Analytics was about helping us make the smartest use of our resources.”

Timely data, clear priorities

Account Analytics identifies patterns in NEC Housing data to reveal who’s most at risk of arrears. Taking information from any revenue account, it presents users with a prioritised caseload based on each customer’s circumstances.

Guinness started to implement Account Analytics in the summer of 2021, with a soft launch in September and full go-live in October 2021. With the system so easy to implement and use, Karen said the team saw the difference straight away:

“The moment they log in, our Advisers can see exactly where their support is needed most. Before, we’d only get notified about escalating debt balances but that’s often too late. Now, we can see if a customer’s credit balance is reducing month on month, so we can pick things up much earlier.”

As well as a prioritised caseload, Advisers get to see each customer’s full profile, so they’re able to reassure them at first contact and build confidence during a sensitive time.

Continuous improvement

Key to Guinness’s choice of Account Analytics was the fact that changes to how cases get prioritised can be completed in-house. Daniel Campbell is Service Improvement Manager at Guinness:

“We can change the set-up of Account Analytics ourselves at no extra cost. That’s a real benefit, because we’re always looking to improve the support we offer customers. It’s also much easier to categorise cases, generate reports and monitor performance.”

Because Account Analytics is part of NEC Housing, there’s no need to extract data for analysis and the caseload gets updated automatically. This means any action taken is visible without rekeying, making it even more efficient.