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Jan 31, 2022
4 minutes read

Housing aftercare shouldn’t be an afterthought

It’s easy to overlook aftercare. Once you’ve converted a customer, the temptation to focus on the next conversion is all too real. However, providing good quality aftercare and post-purchase service is a crucial part of the purchase funnel.  For housing associations, the period immediately after a conversion is the trickiest time as tenants grapple with their new surroundings and potentially uncover elements of their property they’re dissatisfied with. During that period, attentiveness is key to create brand advocacy and avoid issues further down the line.

Emily Jane Brown
Emily Jane Brown,
Senior Marketing Manager

Make it omnichannel

Making it easy to contact your business is step one. Frustration can easily turn to anger if your customers can’t get in touch easily to register their issues. Being able to contact you via a channel that suits your customer is the first step to defusing potentially explosive situations, but that can cause issues for your team. 

Monitoring every channel you’re active on can be a huge time sap for your customer service team and the potential for missing a key communication is a real threat. To minimise that potential, an omnichannel view that displays and organises your conversations on all channels will help your teams track issues and ensure customers receive timely responses.

CM.com’s Mobile Service Cloud offers an omnichannel dashboard alongside a host of other features to simplify customer care and ensure you’re on top of your customer comms. 

Make it automated

It’s one thing ensuring you’re saying the right thing in the right place at the right time to your customers, it’s another to deal with volume efficiently. Intercept the everyday queries that take up your team’s valuable time with a layer of automation.

Chatbots, voicebots and knowledge bases are excellent ways to screen customer queries and direct customers to the correct destination to get immediate help for their issue. After all, there’s nothing worse for a customer than being handed around multiple agents, eating into time they’d no doubt rather spend elsewhere. All of these solutions are part of CM.com’s Conversational AI Cloud.

Chatbots can run through pre-programmed scripts to ascertain the issue or, if you need something more advanced, AI ‘bots can crawl your site or the wider internet to find answers to trickier questions.

The voicebot route gives your callers a familiar voice to interact with, but there’s no limit to the amount of calls it can handle, unlike our often overworked and overrun customer service team. 

Make it organised

Once your customers are routed through to the right agent and their issue is being looked into, you’ll want to make sure you’ll build on the goodwill your efficient query-handling has built up. Chances are that you’ll be engaging with third-party agencies or companies in order to resolve your customers’ issues, so being able to accurately track the status of individual cases is paramount. CM.com’s Agent Inbox allows you to easily manage external suppliers and collaborate with internal teams. It gives you a single inbox with every piece of customer data in one place, allowing you to quickly update your customers on the status of their issue. Skills-based routing ensures problems are routed directly to the most relevant contact and you can set SLAs based on time to respond to ensure your customers are never kept waiting for an update. 

Making high quality housing aftercare a key part of your business strategy will safeguard and build advocacy from your existing customer base. Building a reputation for excellent customer service and aftercare isn’t a luxury; with information and reviews so readily available, it’s absolutely vital that you ensure your happy customers remain that way through the life of their relationship with you. If you’d like to discuss how we can help streamline your customer and after sales service, get in touch with us and we’ll talk you through the range of options CM.com offers. 

Streamline your customer and after sales service with Mobile Service Cloud.

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Emily Jane Brown
Emily Jane Brown,
Senior Marketing Manager
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Is the Marketing Manager for the UK and Ireland at CM.com and mainly writes about the music and sports industry with a focus on attendee experience.

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