This year, our user groups were based at the Concorde Centre (Manchester) and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (London), with many of our customers taking part in one or both of our team building activities, Concorde Tour or Dare SkyWalk.

What do our user groups focus on?

Our user groups focus on ensuring our clients are getting the most from their Active Housing systems and help shape future development roadmaps. We also leverage the time to let customers review prototypes and new feature designs to ensure that they are fit-for-purpose when released.

Attending our Manchester User Group, Madison Kelly-Morrow, Customer Service Manager at Golding Homes, said:

“It was great to collaborate with other housing associations and get insight into the use of their customer portal.”

What we learnt from our latest user group

1. Repairs are still the number one issue for most of our clients. With a shortage of resources in the sector, and rising material costs, it’s more important than ever to ensure that:

- Jobs are diagnosed correctly to improve ‘Right First Time‘

- No access levels are reduced

- Communication is provided where routine jobs cannot be scheduled straight away due to limited resources

2. The appetite for Chatbots has significantly reduced over the last few years. We still see a future for chatbots in the sector but more to handle simple queries and support, rather than transactional services. This is how large organisations and brands like Amazon utilise their Chatbots.

3. Another interesting thing to note is that most of our clients’ approach to working varies from totally remote to hybrid, with only a couple of organisations returning to full-time in the office. Our view is that the agility and connectivity that hybrid working allows is clearly the way forward for many sectors.

Making significant progress

Back in March we had our first user group of 2022, and a number of features and services were requested by our clients. We were actually able to implement these prior to the second user group, including:

- Release webinars

- Duplicate repairs booking prevention

- Azure SSO

- Increased reporting

- Multi-file uploads for repairs reporting

Also, at the user group in March, the clients requested a forum facility where Active Housing customers can collaborate with each other. At our more recent user group, we demoed three possible solutions to the group and let them pick the final solution.

One client said:

“Customer engagement is top notch, [and] we can see we have fed into the roadmap.”

What’s to come?

In 2023, we will be holding our next user groups in Liverpool and London, which we’re really excited about.

We recommend that all our clients attend at least one of our user groups each year to get a view of the exciting things we are working on and to collaborate and share ideas with our amazing community.

If you are an existing client and would like to attend, please let your client success manager know. If you would like to become an Active Housing client and attend, please get in touch here: /contact