Exeter City Council Digital Housing Case Study

Before the project, staff were subjected to repetitive manual processes in order to record housing applications and assist those looking to determine eligibility to the register and homelessness services. The outputs from the project enhanced and streamlined this through a shift away from manual paper processes to digital access, primarily through online forms designed in Firmstep. This drove down unnecessary traffic to the customer service centre reducing waiting times and duplicate visits by customers making housing/homeless applications. This has prevented unnecessary paperwork and eliminated wasted officer time allowing resource to be used more constructively.

Increased Simple Engagement

Video tutorials were commissioned on the Devon Home Choice website. The videos were themed around 4-5 areas of the application process to offer customers support when using the forms. They provide additional guidance before customers need to directly engage officer time, the videos cover:

• Introduction to Devon Home Choice
• How to apply
• How to bid
• How applicants are selected

The videos simplified the application process into sections, allowing customers to access the most relevant section of the process they were engaging with. One-minute in length was the optimum amount with users and the videos have had over 5,000 views since they launched in July 2020.

User Testing and Engagement

A critical aspect to the successful uptake of the forms was the reduction of doubt in this process that is often heightened due to the individual’s circumstances for turning to the council for housing support.

For instance, one of the forms produced was the ‘contact your case worker’ form. This form was designed in response to the number of visits from customers without appointments hoping to see their case worker, who was not always available. When the ‘contact your caseworker’ form is submitted, the customer receives an automated email clearly indicating the next steps within two working days. This was a recurring area of frustration discovered through user research. The uncertainty in the housing application process was highlighted:

“You know, I came in and I spoke to someone who was very nice, but an appointment was not booked for me and I went away, still not really knowing if I was going to get any help”.

A temperature gauge was included at the end of the online triage form for a 6-month period to collate feedback on the process with questions including:

• How easy did you find the form?
• Was there anything that wasn't easy?
• Do you feel better than you felt before you contacted us?
• Do you feel worse?
• Is there anything that you feel uncertain about?

This allowed the team to understand how people were reacting to services to determine the impact of the forms. 80% respondents stated that they found the form easy to use, and 89% confirmed they would use online housing services again.  Using this information, the team can continue to adapt, revise and finesse the forms and the overall digital housing offer.

Additional Scope

The housing access and options team saw the success of the project and sought to harness an online form too with the help of the project team. This would allow the council to better secure access to the private rented sector for several clients.

The team built and launched a form on the website that highlights the landlord’s incentive scheme to be completed by landlords to express their interest in working with the team to provide properties. In the first 5 months over 35 expressions of interest were registered online. This is separate to the rest of this project but the process of building the forms was informed by the learning from the digital housing project. A primary aim of the council is to be agile, flexible and collaborative which has led to other departments exploring how to digitise their services taking inspiration from this project.

Overall Impact

The online triage system has had a fundamental impact on the way that the team works and processes service demand increases. There are options available for customisation which is more flexible than the previous system and it has significantly reduced and virtually eliminated the manual steps like scanning and printing. If the council had not implemented this system of forms the covid-19 pandemic could have had a major impact on the ability to deal with increased demand. Aside from a small minority who may not have access to any electronic device or the internet, the council could be positioned to continue the delivery of a full end to end housing options service without a single member of staff ever leaving their front door.

Challenges

Culture change beyond digital

After developing the technology, difficulty followed when introducing this with customers. Changing human behaviour was much harder than anticipated. The covid-19 pandemic has contributed to changing behaviours in an unprecedented way.

Before the pandemic, a large proportion of customers would ‘double visit’ the Civic Centre, first to book the appointment and then to attend this booked appointment. The introduction of the online triage form aimed to reduce the number of customers accessing the Civic Centre in person to book an appointment that they would need to return for on another day. Initially, educating customers about this alternative pathway to prevent double visits was slow. The covid-19 lockdown has created a forced culture change alleviating the challenge of persuading residents to use the online processes. The team are exploring how to consolidate this culture change as we return to a recovery and transition period.  

Another obstacle to overcome was not just changing the mindset of customers, but staff. A pertinent example was the creation of the ‘contact your case worker’ portal as caseworkers were still routinely meeting customers without promoting the alternative pathways into the service to save themselves and the customer time. In the end, the team had to modify email signatures with the links to the form. It was critical to ensure that the frontline team had bought into the change project and understood what they needed to do and why they needed to do it in order to successfully implement change.

Ensuring robust procurement procedures when reviewing legacy systems

The existing online housing register had existed for over 10 years and meant that Exeter were in a slightly different place than other local authorities. Another workstream that occurred simultaneously was the re-procurement of the housing back office system, which delayed some segments of the project.

The team had to manage a robust procurement exercise with a clear idea of principles and specifications for the next stage of the housing system. As with any procurement exercise, the team and board had a weighting between price and quality. Home Connections were well positioned in terms of price difference between different suppliers. This was also an opportunity to refocus modules and functionality that were not harnessed in previous iterations of contracts.

The impact of this process staggered the development of the housing register applications. The housing service opted to select the same supplier they started with and despite the delays, the positive output of pursuing an updated system enabled stronger terms in the renegotiated contract to unlock the functionality of their package which had previously been underused. Signifying the importance of holding suppliers to account through strong procurement processes to ensure value for money when dealing with legacy systems.

Time commitment

LGA funding unlocked capacity and resource to overcome the challenge of dedicating sufficient time to deliver a comprehensive project digitising services in a worthwhile and impactful way. There are no shortcuts to success and having the mindset to dedicate resource was crucial.

Benefit realisation

Since the housing options service went online in 2019 the digital offer the team established has been well received and an extremely popular channel to engage with the housing service. As the service transferred customers online and offered flexible alternatives from direct face to face appointments in the civic centre the service has witnessed time and resource savings from altering the standard type of interaction.

The decrease of face to face appointments since the launch of the digital services has led to non-cashable savings of £21,533 over the first two years with a predicted saving of £53,832 when the service reaches the five-year milestone.

This has enabled the redirection of resource to effectively manage increasing service demand and facilitate more person-centred interventions in the face of increasingly complex approaches. Furthermore, as the team moves to reduce cases of double visits with a more focused offer through the digital forms and refined post-covid processes the service is expected to save a further £7,538 over that five-year period. This sets the potential savings of this project to a substantial £61,370.

At a time of increasing and often complex demand on the service, this enables a more intensive approach to prevention and relief of homelessness, with efficiency savings leading to a 50% increase in homeless preventions 2018/19 - 2019/20.

Key Tools and Approaches

Alongside the development of the Firmstep digital forms, a tool that allowed the council to enable site improvement and web analytics was through the reporting tool, Power BI. These dashboards have allowed the team to understand:

• External traffic
• Internal traffic
• People taking advantage of the 24/7 access including out of hours
• Peak time heat maps

Replicating the Kent digital asset

A tangible positive from engaging and replicating the Kent tool and methodology was the usefulness of the video tutorials. Once the project team presented the Kent videos to the internal Home Choice Board it inspired further confidence for the vision and outputs of the project.   

The team contacted Kent to enquire about a similar framework for the online self-help tool for individuals to answer questions based on their scenarios to direct them towards tailored real time advice. They shared the framework used to build that online form collaborating with the team providing a substantial starting point which has formed the basis of a further part of the project that is now in development.

Input from local government supplier (SDS)

Having a readymade cohort of councils with SDS representing the local government supplier perspective was insightful. The knowledge hub was a collaborative space for all five councils holding the information from previous workshops allowing the team to be guided through project timelines, resources and templates from SDS ultimately saving time.

The team reflected that the SDS business analyst was a valuable contact, enabling utilisation of their technical knowledge around the systems. Stating that they were:

“definitely inspirational to work with…giving you confidence to deliver despite being somebody without formal training and skills in systems design”.

This partnership with SDS had an impact on the project team making a real difference on the quality of outputs.

Overall impact since funding

The funding from LGA was crucial to provide the resources to get this project off the ground. Before the funding and monitoring support, the team attempted to juggle people around, use agencies to backfill gaps and create capacity in order to pursue this project. Once the team had the resource and support it transformed what they were doing. It inspired management to fund another FTE post. This was crucial to the success of the project and allowed commitment on a full-time basis. Although the period of formal project support from LGA has concluded, Exeter continues to work on other innovative digital solutions relying on the same methodology learned working with LGA & the SDS digital partner and anticipates incremental gains over the coming year and beyond.