Published July 2011

The ubiquitous nature of SMS texting in everyday life is now extremely apparent with appointment confirmations being delivered via text from GPs, dentists and hairdressers and it is now being increasingly used by forward-thinking social landlords.

Texting in social housing is nothing new. For many years some tenants have been receiving repairs appointment confirmations via texts and organisations that have adopted this communication channel have seen significant reductions in missed appointments, coupled with increased customer satisfaction.

Imagine an 'average' housing association where approximately 30% of its repairs appointments out of a 1,000 each month are marked as 'no shows', which means the tenants were not in at the time of the appointment. These no shows can cost on average £25 per appointment, which equates to a loss of £7,500 per month and £90,000 per year.

By adopting a text message confirmation system for appointments, the organisation reduces the no shows and they can save approximately £45,000 in the first year.

This example can be applied to all manner of appointments arranged by a housing organisation, such as tenancy matters and estate management issues.

However, appointment confirmations are just one area through which housing organisations can see real benefits from the adoption of text messaging.

Yorkshire Coast Homes, a housing association that manages approximately 4,427 homes based in Scarborough, has been exploring other areas where text messaging can be adopted.

As a highly successful organisation, Yorkshire Coast Homes maintains a low level of rent arrears (placed in the top 10% in the country) and is constantly looking to, not only maintain its impressive record, but continually improve upon it.

Through the adoption of SMS texting to inform tenants of early rent arrears, Yorkshire Coast Homes has seen an increase in face to face traffic at their reception where tenants have received a text message. In turn, those tenants will pay off the small amounts of arrears before they become a problem.

Based on this success, Yorkshire Coast Homes has also rolled out SMS messaging to inform tenants of community events. In the first year they are looking to reduce the number of letters they send to tenants, with proposed savings of over £25,000.

With the focus very much on service delivery, Yorkshire Coast Homes also felt it important to utilise the benefits of instant text messaging for internal staff communication. To that end it has seen increased levels of employee satisfaction due to the use of texts to inform them of team meetings, events and important messages from the management team.

In the current climate of frugality and cost cutting, housing organisations can realise significant cost savings through the adoption of supporting technologies. They can also look to continually improve their services and tenant engagement and subsequent satisfaction.

Click here to view the Yorkshire Coast Homes case study in full.

Organisation: Capita's Housing Division
Contact: Stewart Davison

Telephone:

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