Colleague competency solution - AWARD

The Riverside Group (TRG) are a large Social Housing provider based in Speke, Liverpool. Our customer services team handles c.1m contacts from and to customers each year.

With people at our heart, we've an intent to improve the quality of our services to our customers, whether in social housing or our care and support schemes and services - delivered by engaged and fulfilled colleagues.

We aim to add value by reducing cost through better working practices, without undermining service standards and quality. We'll maximise income by improving our collection rates and optimise our commercial activities.

We're committed to providing a more positive digital experience for customers and colleagues, ensuring that digital is the first choice every time. We currently offer a multichannel ecosystem, but over time aim to deliver a more sophisticated omnichannel experience that is integrated and needs-based.

Further information on what we do can be found here: What we do - Riverside Group.

Colleague competency has been an ongoing challenge for the Customer Service Centre team, with colleagues expected to retain significant process information and knowledge across multiple core servicing areas - Repairs and Maintenance, Income Management, Housing Management, Building Safety, Complaints and Anti-Social Behaviour and Safeguarding. Whilst training and supporting documentation is given/available to colleagues via multiple sources, ongoing quality assurance activities have identified significant gaps in terms of adherence to customer service, compliance and process standards. Current challenges include:

• Average interaction handling time exceeds 10 minutes versus targeted handling time of 8 minutes leading to an increase in customer wait times (target is 3 minutes, current performance 7-10 minutes as of June 2025)

• 40% of the average interaction handling time is spent in wrap (also known as after call work), contributing to reduced advisor availability and increased customer wait times

• When colleagues place a customer on hold, on average this is done for over 3 minutes - highlighting a potential knowledge or process gap

• An advisor teams chat is available to support colleagues with questions or queries, this is used c300 times per day for advisors to ask questions and raise support requests if they're unsure/unable to respond to a customer's query - this means over 100,000 support requests are made and responded to per year, increasing handling time and highlighting an issue with advisor knowledge and competency

• The blending of customer interactions post-system integration/migration of former One Housing customers to incumbent Riverside Group systems (Salesforce, Open Housing etc), has highlighted significant knowledge gaps and process queries - at present there are 20 known knowledge or process issues flagged as part of the integration

• We've over 450 knowledge articles, desig...