Altitude Software and Habitat du Nord

• The Problem:
  

  Habitat du Nord receives several hundreds of calls from tenants everyday, wishing to obtain rent account details or requiring technical intervention. There are also calls from prospects regarding housing requests. Previously, all these incoming calls were managed in a decentralized way by the three agencies located in Maubeuge, Ronchin and Saint-Pol-sur-Mer. Processing these numerous inbound interactions had become a time consuming and error-prone process for each agency. For instance, most complaints had to be handled by the same person that received the complaint, which led to certain delays.

  Today, the tenants have a single email and phone number to contact Habitat du Nord so that they always have a person available to answer their questions. We decided to set up a contact centre after a comprehensive research carried out within our company on how to improve customer service,” said Bernard Carton, general manager of Habitat du Nord. “Our contact centre today efficiently manages all inbound customer interactions and a single number -0811 11 5959- is all that is needed to check the status of an account rent or to ask for a technical intervention.” Located in Villeneuve dAscq, Habitat du Nord’s five-seat contact centre is powered by the Altitude uCI suite. France Telecom worked in partnership with Altitude Software to provide the Alcatel 4200 PABX.

  
  
• Solution:
  

  With the Altitude uCI solution in place, each interaction is automatically routed to the most appropriate agent, who instantly receives a summary of the tenant’s details and history. This fact enables agents to greet tenants by name and instantly view tenant history, empowering them to deal more effectively with each tenant.

  Agents can also check the status of technical interventions or suitability of housing applications with greater speed and efficiency. Furthermore, automated processes have replaced the outdated ones involved in applying for an apartment, registering a technical intervention, and accessing tenant or prospect information. The new system specifically allows agents to transfer a call, to either a supervisor or other agencies to handle specific issues. In this case, all the relevant caller information is forwarded with the call, including information entered by the transferring agent. This functionality saves time, boosts productivity, and eliminates caller irritation.

  In addition, once an enquiry or technical intervention is registered, the system automatically triggers a series of actions required to resolve the problem; and depending on the nature of the issue, messages can be sent to the relevant agency informing them of the subject.

  Our goal is to deliver the most complete and fastest possible answer to tenants and prospects,” declares Lucy Konieczny, Quality Manager at Habitat du Nord. Altitude uCI allows our contact centre agents to significantly improve performance, which has a direct effect on the optimisation of our customer service”.

  The quality of service at Habitat du Nord has increased significantly, with more than 90 percent of first-call resolution rates. In addition, the average speed of answer—which defines the average time it takes to answer all telephone calls, is of 8.5 seconds since the beginning of 2004.

  
  
• Result:
  

  As a result of these achievements, Habitat du Nord was recently honoured with the prestigious 2004 <<Casque d’Or>> award for best customer support in the French public service, during the SeCA exhibition, which took place in Paris, France, in May 2004. Winners were selected for their excellence in customer support and the judging panel included several contact centre specialists.

  In addition, Habitat du Nord was the recipient in April 2004 of the AFAQ-Qualibail Engagements de Service®>> certification for its innovative Social Housing Management activity. Commenting on these awards, Céline Kudlaszyk, Communications Director at Habitat du Nord, said: Receiving these awards is a great honour for Habitat du Nord. It is well-earned tribute to our hard working team and further recognition of our track record for success in providing services to customers as efficiently as we can >>. The <<Casque d’Or>> awards are organized by the AFRC (French Association of Call centres and Customer Relationship), the SECA exhibition and the "Centres d’appels" magazine, in collaboration with Cesmo and SupMediacom.