Year 1 with MRI Customer Self Service: How GreenSquare’s teams and customers are benefiting
1 year on from adopting MRI’s digital platform, GreenSquare are seeing a real impact on their customer engagement, data analytics and call centre, exceeding their five-year target for verified users within the first year and taking over £4million in online payments.
GreenSquare adopted MRI’s Customer Self Service Platform after realising that providing a digital service offering to customers would offer greater channel choice, streamline their processes, save money and allow them to focus their resource on helping more vulnerable customers and resolving more complex cases.
After a year, GreenSquare’s customers are seeing real value in their online digital service, called myGreenSquare, which gives customers the ability to update their personal details, make payments and access information about their account online, without the need to call or wait to speak to someone.
Encouraging customer engagement
Working alongside the team at MRI, GreenSquare’s first-year focus was on introducing the digital service platform as an additional service channel, in order to ensure its stability and confirm customers could use it as a long-term service solution. Early feedback suggested the functionality of the platform was ideal for customers – they liked the simple, straightforward interface – and minimal front end changes were needed. This meant the team at GreenSquare were able to expand on their original goals, focusing on increasing usage and registering more customers.
After setting an initial 5-year target of having 35% of their customer base as verified users, after just a year GreenSquare are seeing 45% of their customer base now registered on the platform, around 6,500 users in total. This excellent take-up means everyday services that would usually involve the customer calling and potentially having to waiting to speak to an officer can now be done online, in the customer’s own time without the need to call the contact centre.
Streamlining transactions
One service that has shown the value of the platform is the rent payments functionality. Over the past year, GreenSquare customers have made over 15,000 payments, totalling almost £5million, in rent and other payments through the online platform.
The team at GreenSquare had previously been struggling to migrate customers to managing their own payments. While customer self-management is also possible over the phone, this was under-used, with many still preferring to wait to speak to an officer when they called. With the digital platform, GreenSquare has seen much more success with encouraging customers to take control of their own payments.
Supporting a flexible workforce
For the GreenSquare team, the digital platform has provided great benefits. In lockdown, for instance, having an online digital platform has made working from home and socially distant working much simpler. As online contacts have overtaken call volume, with 2,000 calls in the month of May/June and 5,000 contacts through myGreenSquare (29,000 messages have been sent over the platform since its launch), GreenSquare have been able to reduce the number of essential staff required to work from its office. Online contacts are easier for teams to deal with when working from home, and can be sorted and passed to the relevant department far more efficiently.
Providing data insight
Reporting and analytics means the teams at GreenSquare can feedback internally to their colleagues and to the board what customers are doing online and where improvements and new services can be implemented into the system.
The past year has been spent finessing the reporting functionality and developing processes to access the most useful data for the team, resulting in a comprehensive dashboard which displays relevant, up to date information, helping to streamline operations and keep the whole team informed.
Future developments in progress
After a successful first year, MRI are working with GreenSquare to further develop and streamline their digital self service offering.
The success of the myGreenSquare platform in its first year has proved to the team it can work as a primary service channel alongside their other services, and work on training more team members to work with it is underway to integrate the system more fully into the business. GreenSquare will also continue with successful incentive programmes, encouraging staff to engage users to register on the digital platform, and is carrying out analytical work to identify and resolve blockers that might be discouraging customers from using the online features.
The team are also in the process of implementing newly-launched Customer Self Service functions to help streamline enquiry management, such as categorisation of customer messages to automatically send them to the relevant department, reducing response times and eliminating the need to manage them centrally. Responsive forms are also a high priority for the GreenSquare team for the platform’s second year, adding the functionality to collect a much wider range of customer data within the self service platform.
