The largest housing provider in the south west has appointed Ian Fisher as its new Executive Director of Digital and Business Change with a remit to spearhead the organisation’s transformation of its digital strategy.
Leading and managing a programme of digital projects, Ian has been charged with the responsibility to deliver successful technological solutions to help the housing provider enhance its service offering.
Proving cutting-edge digital services will allow customers to access LiveWest’s information and services at their convenience. But the housing association, which plans to spend £2billion over the next 10 years across the region, will continue to offer a personal touch.
The Government’s Social Housing Green Paper points to an increasing recognition that tenants and residents of social landlords need to be able to influence the service quality around their homes.
LiveWest is listening to its customers and reflecting their needs by prioritising essential services for technological investment.
The start of the journey will coincide with the launch of LiveWest’s new website in the spring as the organisation continues to evolve its customer first-based services.
Ian said: “We are going to align our services to the way people want to engage with us so we are going to invest in the right technology.
“It’s important to make sure our investment aligns to what customers want. What we don’t want to go is become an organisation that is channel-shifting everyone to go online.
“Our proposition is we want to give people a choice. If our customers want to go online and book and track repairs at 3am, then fine.
“But we need to enable the technology to allow that to happen and if someone wants to speak to one of our customer services’ advisors, we need to make sure that can happen as well.”
Technological improvements will also ensure LiveWest’s workforce have the necessary tools to drive efficiency and boost customer satisfaction.
In an attempt provide the best customer service, LiveWest is exploring ways of integrating all its systems onto one platform as part of its new digital strategy.
This single system will then provide the springboard to build technology from and boost its service delivery.
The integration project will ensure items such as rent, income, repairs and sales all sit across one platform, helping employees to work in a connected and more efficient way.
Ian added: “There is an appetite for change at LiveWest. We are all looking forward to being able to use the technology to get the most out of the business.
“We have got to recognise that there is a business process that runs through any organisation and what we are looking to do is fundamentally standardise the business process through the use of a single system to enable the business to perform effectively and efficiently.
“The technology exists that will enable customers to manage all of their services from LiveWest from one customer portal. It will be easy to use and, most importantly, meet their needs. It’s all about simplifying people’s lives through the use of technology.
“We are absolutely in the right place to get those underlying systems and processes defined and in place and, beyond that, the world is our oyster.
“We have the ultimate potential to evaluate all technologies available to the sector and implement it knowing we have got the baseline right.
“Embracing new technologies will allow us to become more flexible and adapt to change.”
A large part of LiveWest’s drive to become more technologically efficient is to attract and retain the services of entrepreneurs from across the region, who can play a key part in innovation.
Ian added: “We need local organisations and entrepreneurs with digital skills to come and support our journey and help us develop the next evolution of tools and technologies that are really going to serve our customers and our business.”