Investment in future technology helps Sovereign meet customers' needs

It is committed to providing more homes, better places and excellent services to customers and is driven by social purpose, placing those customers at the heart of everything it does.

In order to drive efficiencies throughout the organisation they needed to migrate all staff, regardless of location, onto a single holistic contact centre and UC environment.

Sovereign wanted a scalable future-proofed “single pane of glass” solution which would integrate with business critical applications including Housing Management, Human Resources and Repair systems, taking their customer experience to the next level.

At the same time, they wanted to ensure their customers could contact them at a time of their choosing and, through their preferred channel of communication, without crucial information about themselves or their enquiry being misplaced. Their existing telephony and contact centre infrastructures could not offer the flexibility and functionality needed to meet Sovereign’s “digital first” channel strategy aimed at improving tenant satisfaction whilst simultaneously reducing costs to serve their customers.

Working with their technology partner FourNet, Sovereign opted for the Communications Centre (CC) from Enghouse Interactive to integrate with its existing Skype for Business UC environment. By transitioning to a digital environment and adopting CC, Sovereign is now able to process higher volumes of calls and emails though its contact centre, and deliver exceptional service to its growing customer base.

Sovereign also knew, however, that having a high-quality contact centre solution in place to complement this core unified communications platform would be key. The customer service team at Sovereign is always busy. It has a large customer base who contact them to report repairs to their homes or to rebook and chase appointments, so it required a platform capable of handling large volume and demand. It also needed to be easy to use and require very little training to speed up the on boarding of new agents.

Following an extensive formal tendering process, Sovereign selected FourNet, to implement Communication Centre as its standardised contact centre and integrate it into their Skype for Business environment. FourNet ensured that all calls moved smoothly between the two systems and that Sovereign were able to extract contact centre data in SSRS, along with data feeds from other business critical applications such as rents and repairs platforms. Also, the TouchPoint client in CC has made it easy for the agents to get up and running on the solution and has given Sovereign a good adoption rate.

Sovereign are currently rolling out Microsoft Dynamics 365 throughout the organisation. One of the compelling reasons for selecting Communications Centre is its ability to integrate with D365 so that they can track and consolidate all activity. It also gives agents a 360 degree view of the customer to help them provide informed answers and will also open up other channels of communication. Sovereign are primarily using CC for Voice and Email but plan to bring on new channels in the near future.

Sovereign also benefits from the Enghouse Interactive Quality Management System (QMS). It has made extensive use of the solution’s call recording functionality and has now extended this to encompass screen recording. The ability to not only listen to interactions but also see them is invaluable to team leaders. Enghouse Interactive QMS is key in helping agents and enabling Sovereign to improve its service. Being able to identify process inefficiencies or areas to concentrate on during agent training is invaluable as is celebrating great service.

Also, by using scorecard functionality, Sovereign has been able to access agents in a fair and consistent fashion, which has helped increase agent morale, reduce staff attrition and improved the customer experience.

Sovereign has also been impressed with the support and versatility FourNet has shown throughout the process. Sovereign wanted a small replica solution to allow them to train new agents and supervisors on in a non-live environment before switching to the live system and also to test new features. FourNet set up a “Sandbox” non-production test environment, which is a unique element to the solution.