Bernicia have been providing quality homes and services to people in the North East for over 50 years, earning a reputation as one of the country’s leading housing providers. To support improvements with their customer service experience they recently purchased Salesforce Service Cloud.

Bernicia were looking to deliver an omni channel customer service experience to cover their existing complaints process.

The requirement to Alscient consisted of the following:

• Provide the ability to receive complaints over the phone, email, web forms, letters, SMS, WhatsApp and web chat.
• Support the ability to provide CSAT’s following Case completion.
• Provide the ability to communicate via their preferred medium and switch across channels as required.
• Support the ability to create mail merged documents for different stages of the complaints process.
• Support a bi-directional integration with QL (Housing Management System) synchronising Tenant, Work Order, Asset, Tenancy, Application and Case detail.
• Manage cases to SLA at key stages of their complaints process.
• Provide reports and dashboards within the system to track the progression of Cases.

Alscient addressed these requirements in a phased approach.  

We initially held a series of discovery workshops to ascertain the full set of requirements. A design document was then provided to capture the full set of requirements.

Following sign-off of the design, functionality was built out over a series of sprints.

End user feedback was provided throughout in the form of show and tells. Following a period of system testing the solution was then handed over for user acceptance testing (UAT). Following successful completion of UAT and end user training the system was made live.  

A branded web page was provided to allow tenants and members of the public to provide comments and compliments. A web chat facility was also provided to allow chat interactions to take place. 

Existing mailboxes were also mounted across to Salesforce to allow Cases to be created upon receipt of emails. WhatsApp and SMS capability was also delivered (for future rollout in the future). The solution also allowed for survey requests to be sent out following closure of the Case.

Finally, a real time integration was built with QL (the existing housing management system) to push changes to customer and housing information directly through to Salesforce.

Details of Cases held in Salesforce were also synchronised back with the housing management system to avoid the need to double key information.

All aspects of the project were successfully delivered, within the original budget with the customer experience being enhanced via the provision of a true omnichannel solution.