L&Q
L&Q create a new and modern digital experience for their customers
L&Q create a new and modern digital experience for their customers
Bespoke customer research in 2019 evidenced that L&Q residents wanted to manage their accounts online; over 60% expressed a desire to self-serve. The Coronavirus pandemic accelerated these needs highlighting the demand for online portals and tools to manage day-to-day tasks and place help and advice at the fingertips of customers. The introduction of the online portal has seen tremendous uptake from residents with annual sign-up and engagement targets being smashed within the first 3 months.
L&Q Homes are a leading charitable housing association providing outstanding social housing and communities across London and the South East of the UK. With nearly 60 years of experience, today they house and provide support for around 250,000 people in over 105,000 homes and are one of the largest landlords in the UK.
L&Q describe themselves as ‘A developer with social purpose’ They aim to deliver great service and quality to every customer, every time, and they are always looking for ways to improve. L&Q’s relationship with their customers is built on trust, transparency and fairness – they are there when they’re needed – locally responsive and working hard to keep communities safe and vibrant.
Their ambition to help customers realise their full potential, led to establishing the L&Q foundation which funds education and social programmes that improve people’s chances in life. They also offer care and support services to people with a wide range of needs, including older people, people with learning disabilities and mental health needs. During the Covid pandemic access to this support became ever more valuable to L&Q’s customers
L&Q’s vision is that everyone deserves a quality home that provides them with the opportunity to live a better life.
L&Q Homes engaged Sagittarius to create a new and modern digital experience including a secure self-service customer portal, on the Sitecore platform.
The key challenges were to integrate existing and disparate enterprise technologies into a single synchronised ecosystem. This would require detailed project management and agile delivery methodology. The key objective of L&Q was to ensure that current and future tenants, regardless of ability, age or skill, felt digitally supported and were able to translate and interact with the organisation online. These objectives and challenges became far more pertinent with the on-set of a global pandemic at the start of the project.
Following a period of discovery, Sagittarius created a detailed project plan to enable the rapid development of a revolutionary Sitecore digital experience for L&Q Homes. Sagittarius conducted stakeholder interviews, UX discovery and analysis of customer needs, profiles and personas to formulate a high-level feature site map. Technical integrations were also planned, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 (their on-premise ERP system), Microsoft Azure B2C (allowing for social media login), Bottomline payment gateway, Verint Transversal (knowledge management systems) and Puzzel.
Phase 2 of our work is looking to solve a key challenge for customers who are searching for new properties. Online searches don’t always provide L&Qs target audience with the most suitable home or tenure for their circumstances. In addition, L&Q don’t have any way to pre-qualify leads or direct those who do not qualify towards a suitable alternative – this leads to inefficiencies for both the business and the customer leading to frustration. This problem also impacts the marketing team’s ability to deliver quality leads that convert, making it difficult to track how their campaigns are performing.
Since the roll-out of this project, L&Q customers can now self-service via the portal, getting a personalised digital experience, delivered at scale, with relevant content, support and account management capabilities that put the customer in control of their housing accommodation. L&Q Homes successfully adapted to customers’ needs during the global Covid pandemic with over 10,000 residents (the annual target) signing up and interacting with the portal within the first 3 months. This is just the initial foray in L&Q’s digital journey to transform its residents’ digital experiences and shift 50% of its transactional services to online by 2025. Booking, scheduling and tracking repairs are all significant aspects of tenants taking charge of their property management, and it’s the customer experience that has accelerated L&Q’s aspirations to deliver this service online, even with the huge complications it faces with streamlining archaic systems and augmenting its service partners.
L&QHomes are now looking into further leveraging this deeper understanding of their customer by migrating the LQhomes.com into its Sitecore architecture, so they can capitalise on increased personalisation, marketing automation and cross-selling opportunities.
Experience the power of a multi-disciplinary team that drives your digital roadmap