Live and let Dial

With its soft lighting and state-of-the-art technology, Circle 33's call centre is a far cry from the estate offices it replaced. Two years ago, the housing association swapped scattered local services for a centralised housing management and maintenance hotline. Now 180 customer service staff work together at its north London base in a renovated tramshed near King's Cross.

The association found that its London estate offices in Hackney, Haringey, Islington and east London just weren't adequate for its wide-ranging stock. Tenants were more likely to telephone than travel across their borough to speak with a housing officer face to face. As the volume of calls grew, Circle 33's directors took a long hard look at their customer service provision and decided some changes were in order.

It's a choice that many other housing association managers may soon have to make. Last month, the William Sutton Trust said it was considering closing 25 of its 60 estate offices as the result of a new card payment scheme for rent collection. Over-the-counter payments occupy a fifth of staff time at the trust's offices, but this manual chore will be phased out by July.

Roger De La Mare, director of inspections at the Housing Corporation, is seeing a general trend towards scaling back estate offices in favour of call centres. "As a result of best-value reviews, organisations are looking at different ways of doing things, and certainly different ways of reorganising customer relationships," he says.

Housing associations are the victims of sweeping changes in public behaviour, as the telephone has become the nation's favourite way of making enquiries and dealing with problems. There's also consumer choice to thank – as tenants are presented with a variety of rent payment methods and venues, a trip to their nearest office during working hours becomes less appealing.

Neighbourhood offices that once received a steady stream of tenants now reverberate to the sound of ringing phones, causing many managers to wonder exactly how suited they are to their new function. In an era of best-value reviews and customer service targets, traditional points of contact have come under greater scrutiny and, in some cases, been found wanting.

The annual cost to William Sutton of running each of its estate offices ranges from £5000 to £315,000. Opening hours also vary considerably, as does the number of transactions each undertakes every week, from 23 up to 645. According to chief executive Mike Morris, the most obvious targets for closure would be smaller offices that don't open much, or that deal with very few properties. This means, he says, that staff will be free to concentrate on other ways of supporting tenants. "We need to look at what is the function of an estate office in the 21st century, as opposed to what we were doing 40, 50 or even 100 years ago. The broad feeling is that we could reduce them in number and reduce staffing in some of them," says Morris.

The fate of front-line staff is one of the most emotive issues surrounding office closures, whether they fear job losses or a fundamental shift in their role. Both Circle 33 and East Thames Housing Group made considerable cost savings by closing their estate offices, but stress that redundancies were not the object of the exercise. "We had a policy of no redundancies, and of not making anyone work in the call centre if it wasn't what they wanted," says John Macfarlane, director of customer services at Circle 33. "We had enough jobs to go round in the back office – but everybody's job has changed." When Circle 33 closed four London offices, 46 staff were displaced.

Only "one or two" chose to work in the customer service centre, the rest opting for back-office supporting roles. Many were promoted.

The atmosphere of Circle 33's customer service centre is a world away from the high-stress, strip-lit cattlesheds of modern nightmares. Howard Cresswell, group director of corporate services, says staff with call centre experience are impressed by the facility, as was the Investors in People assessor in 2002. Cresswell points out that the work is much more varied: Circle 33's agents field a wide variety of calls compared to staff in commercial call centres, and work on projects in other parts of the organisation.

The primary motivation for reorganisation at East Thames Housing Group was changing the roles of existing staff. After a major customer service review in October 1999, the group decided that tenant support and rent collection should be separated. "You had housing officers, on the one hand, trying to be tenants' friends and giving them extra support – and the next day going round to collect their rent and, if they were having problems, looking to evict them," says Dave Anteh, head of customer services.

The association has already implemented a swipe-card scheme – similar to the one William Sutton is rolling out – and tenants can pay their rent at post offices, by phone or via the Girobank website, as well as in area offices. The last of these options was proving the least popular. "We looked at the number of people using our offices and it was definitely not cost-effective or efficient. Some days we would have just one person coming into the office," says Anteh.

East Thames shut its six area offices, which were all in east London, and moved staff into its headquarters, in six new teams focusing on different aspects of housing management and community support. Responses were mixed. "There was an amount of trepidation," admits Anteh. "It was a fairly big change, and we were creating roles that many housing associations don't have. People weren't sure, especially if they'd been working in traditional associations for a long time."

Three years later, this is water under the bridge at East Thames. Feedback from tenants has been largely positive, with doubters reassured as they received the benefits of an improved service, says Anteh. He believes that there has been no loss of contact with residents. All of East Thames' sites are within a reasonably compact area, so residents don't have to travel far to see a duty officer at the centre – though they are more likely to call up to arrange for someone to visit them.

William Sutton chief Mike Morris is keen to stress that the group will not abandon local service provision. "We've always had, and will continue to have, locally based offices," he says. "As a national organisation, it's pointless being distant."

But Circle 33's 20-year-old network of area offices had little neighbourhood focus to lose. "Some weren't local to anything," says customer services director John Macfarlane. "Even when there was a genuine local office, people were still using phones. Area offices work better when it's very steady – no new properties, stable staff – but that's hard to sustain in central London."

Circle 33 now takes 200,000 calls a year, and receives 96% of customer contact by the telephone, with paper and electronic communications commanding only 2% each. It still runs five surgeries a week at three locations but demand has dwindled.

When a tenant calls the centre, they receive a fully informed and personalised service. Their details instantly pop up on the agent's screen, along with information on every previous contact and the status of repairs and enquiries. There are no scripts – agents are recruited on the basis of their ability to assimilate information and act on it, and undergo a rigorous training programme before they are let loose on the phones. The aim is for eight out of 10 calls, whatever the subject, to be resolved by a front-line agent. Even the two out of 10 who are transferred to specialist teams don't need to repeat themselves because all documentation is transferred with them.

There's evidence that replacing estate offices actually results in more contact with tenants, rather than the loss of communication sceptics might expect. Associations that open call centres are often shocked by the speed at which the service takes off, and find managing the scale of demand the greatest challenge. "The volume of calls has increased dramatically because residents find it so accessible," says Dave Anteh at East Thames. "We've had to increase staff numbers." Evidently, tenants who deem their enquiry unworthy of a trip to the office are happy to pick up the phone.

Circle 33 director of corporate services Howard Cresswell believes that, in future, many more enquiries will come from the internet. There are signs that it may not be long before this really takes off. A recent survey of Circle 33's tenants found that a surprisingly high 35% have access to the web, whether at home or work. The government is keen to see a greater shift to online access across all public services, and has pledged to provide internet access to anyone that wants it.

When they are adopted to a more significant extent, the convenience of the internet may mean visitor numbers, already sparse in some areas, drop to new lows – dealing estate offices another, perhaps final, blow.