for employees to deliver more value to residents.
to increase productivity.
for employees who rated their experience highly.
London Borough of Redbridge maintains more than 5,000 homes across North East London, providing social housing, emergency housing and key worker accommodation.
London Borough of Redbridge needed to improve its tenancy management services to improve productivity and deliver an even higher standard of services to tenants.
London Borough of Redbridge's dated system involved highly manual processes, resulting in wasted time for staff and stress and frustration for residents. The Borough knew it needed to simplify and automate key business processes, including updating tenants' details, managing repairs, checking rent account balances and requesting payments to improve the experience of its team and its tenants.
To do this, managers in the Housing department knew they needed to replace their existing housing management system so that frontline staff could work more effectively and spend more time in the field.
The Borough received funding through the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities' (DLUHC) Local Digital Fund to prototype three tenancy management processes across three low code platforms, each of which was a candidate to replace its housing management platform.
Ensono Digital began by process mapping three key housing services: change of tenant's details, application for sole to joint tenancy, and application for a succession of tenancy. We looked at the entire process from a resident's initial engagement to the final touchpoint, picking out the pain points and opportunities for improvement at each step.
Working closely with the London Borough of Redbridge's Housing Services team, Ensono Digital ran a series of workshops to evaluate user needs. We defined new process maps and user journeys for each process, reducing manual tasks and designing for automation.
Ensono Digital's customer experience team developed visual prototypes to show how the new user journeys would look and behave and how the new application could be used as a platform for all future housing services.
Ensono Digital participated in usability testing sessions with the Borough's housing officers to understand how they interacted with each process, to identify issues in the user journeys and to ensure that the new designs were intuitive.
By placing the user at the heart of the project, Ensono Digital has ensured the Borough more effectively meets the needs of its employees and tenants, with housing officers able to spend less time doing manual tasks and more time adding value to their community.
The approach to redesigning the London Borough of Redbridge's business processes has the potential to be shared and reused between councils and not only transform tenancy management but leasehold services and income collection.
Testing the new processes led to ~74% time savings for employees when completing the sole to joint process and ~62% when completing the change of tenant details process, freeing them from admin to spend more facetime with tenants.
Automated messaging to tenants reduces manual steps that would otherwise lead to delays with timely prompts at critical points leading to more successful process completions.
A more integrated view of what is going on for any one tenant can be shared with other teams within Redbridge and be made accessible to residents with a planned self-service portal in the future.