Platform Housing Group, who owns and manages over 48,000 homes across the Midlands, has launched a pilot, in-house Out of Hours (OOH) service to improve and enhance their customers' experience when reporting emergency repairs outside of normal opening hours.

In just the first two weeks of the service launching, the new OOH team has handled over 700 emergency customer calls. These calls were answered on average, in just 96 seconds with only 30% requiring an emergency out of hours repair to be actioned. This is a 19% reduction in the number of calls received needing an operative to attend out of hours.

Initial data indicates that effective emergency repairs diagnosis, at this first point of contact, is minimising the number of urgent repair jobs being raised and is helping to reduce the impact that emergencies have on Platform's daily, scheduled repair service.

The team has also dealt with more than 1,350 customer enquiries, during the same time period, from a variety of digital customer contact channels, including web and customer portal enquiries, ensuring contact via other communication channels is being managed promptly.

Marion Duffy, Platform's Chief Operations Officer, said:

"Platform's Out of Hours pilot has got off to a flying start, with the skilled call handlers in our newly formed, dedicated team delivering a new and improved service to our customers.

"You can't predict when an emergency will occur, so it's vitally important that our advisors can quickly triage emergency calls accurately and sympathetically. It's therefore great to see them quickly settling in and working closely with our repairs teams to ensure that our customers receive an excellent service, first time, every time."

Platform is using a raft of new innovative technologies to enable their customers to contact them in a way, and at a time that suits them, including website chatbot and livechat. Video calling, to diagnose and assess repairs, is also proving extremely successful.

By delivering the new OOH service in-house, rather than via a third party supplier, Platform is hoping to deliver long-term cost savings, while enhancing services to their customers, particularly when reporting emergency repairs, out of hours.