Background
Accent Group was established in 1966 and provides affordable housing and services across the North, East and South of England. With over 20,000 homes, Accent Housing offers high quality, affordable homes for those also taking the first step on the housing ladder, a new beginning, or more support.
Accent’s property sales team, Homemade offers both new and resale shared ownership homes opportunities across the UK, helping hundreds of people into home ownership. For Accent’s customers who are renting, Accent Housing provide support such as repairs, house exchanges and safety advice.
The Problem
Accent is committed to playing its part in fixing the housing crisis by developing hundreds of new homes every year, helping it to meet their significant growth objectives. Despite the pandemic, Accent continue to thrive and excel. They have formed an experienced team, so adding systems and fine-tuning processes which increase team member efficiency were more important than ever. The customer management system that Accent Housing used across the business was not suitable for managing a larger sales programme as well as the secondary transactions associated with the Shared Ownership tenure.
The team required a cloud-based system to improve collaboration, organisation, and remote working, as the previous system stored files and customer actions locally. Accent Housing strive to provide the best customer experience for customers, but the team felt that the experience could be improved further with a more efficient and connected system.
The Solution
Having had experience in implementing Dynamics 365 to support homebuilders and housing associations, Crimson was able to engage and highlight the Property Accelerator solution. This leverages the leading customer engagement platform Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its underlining technology and had most key entities, reports, workflows, business processes and fields and forms which allowed Accent to get up and running much faster with a leading CRM tool to help them drive growth, scale, and governance amongst the team sales team. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales improves staff efficiency with workflow, automation, and integrated sales and marketing solutions, which can also integrate with enquiry portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla. Not only does this allow the team to execute day to day sales tasks more efficiently, but it also allows for improved prospect scoring and conversions.
ClickDimensions was also implemented as to help drive marketing efforts and improve the quality and effectiveness of Accent’s marketing messaging out to prospects and customers.
Accent Housing’s system was integrated with housing management software MIS, which enabled the passing of key customer and agreement data to remove any risk of human error between the two databases, and most importantly to remove risk of duplicates/double-handling of data. This has further supported Accent to drive a single view of customer data.
The Outcome
The solutions Crimson provided help Accent Housing to market and sell homes to customers across their different tenure types, including Shared Ownership and Outright Sale.
As the coronavirus pandemic led to social distancing measures mid-implementation, the cloud-based technologies and digitalisation of documents provided significant benefits to Accent Housing while employees were working from home. This enabled the team to continue providing essential services to customers and selling affordable homes.
By improving staff efficiency thanks to automated and integrated sales and marketing solutions and enquiry portal integration, sales are being executed more efficiently, prospect scoring has improved which in turn is allowing for more effective conversion. Disparate data removal and streamlined processes led to an improvement in overall organisation. The Accent team are now able to easily see the sales data and tasks in front of them, spending less time on admin and piecing together information, and more time on the personable side of home selling.
The Dynamics 365 solution has also improved the customer experience and made Accent far easier to deal with, following the removal of paper-based customer forms which are now digital, and workflow notifications to update, and inform customers should any key communications require their attention or action.
I have been going through some very difficult things personally and Crimson have always shown empathy and care and have understood if I have needed to take time out. Also, during lockdown we have had little gifts and treats sent to every employee regularly to show that we aren’t alone and aren’t just a number, which means so much to so many people.
Wendy
Crimson’s lovely Project Co-ordinator