Digital transformation for social housing providers: the Haute-Savoie Habitat case study

We were delighted to interview the team at Haute-Savoie-Habitat. This social housing organisation offers residential properties (housing, garages, and commercial spaces) for rent and sale (social homeownership). With 20'003 rental properties (including 1'894 equivalent units) across 162 municipalities, Haute-Savoie HABITAT is the leading social housing provider in the department.

Haute-Savoie-Habitat: "Hello, I’m Corinne FILLET, Quality Director at Haute-Savoie Habitat. Haute-Savoie Habitat is the public social housing organisation for Haute-Savoie. We manage 20'000 homes across the department on a daily basis. That also means 20'000 tenants, or even more, since there are often multiple people per household, who reach out to us every day."

How does your customer service work?

"All tenant requests are centralised in a customer relations centre staffed by around twenty people. This centre reports to the Quality Department and handles all requests, regardless of the channel used by the tenant."

What’s the volume of requests?

"We receive around 1'000 requests every day, including 300 to 400 phone calls and roughly 600 emails."

How can you improve the service?

"Last summer, in July–August 2020, we decided to develop a chatbot. Our initial goal was to give tenants more autonomy in finding answers to their questions. Then we met fAibrik. After our first discussion with them, it became clear that instead of adding another channel (and thus more development work and new tools for tenants), their advice was to streamline and make our existing processes more efficient. Specifically, they suggested optimising how we manage our emails."

What was the proposal?

"They offered us a tool powered by artificial intelligence that reads tenant emails, understands them, analyses their urgency, identifies the topic, and even assesses the tone to determine whether the tenant is satisfied or not."

Does artificial intelligence improve efficiency?

"We’ve also gained efficiency because the tool automatically detects priorities. Before, this was done manually: someone would read all the emails and manually label them as 'urgent' or 'moderately urgent.' So, we’ve saved time and improved processing speed."

How did change management go?

"In terms of training, we kept it simple because any change requires adaptability from our advisors. It went smoothly because we worked with them individually. We scheduled training sessions when they first started using the tool. In the end, it was very straightforward. Some only needed an hour of training to understand how the tool worked. It’s really quite intuitive."

A platform or a custom solution?

"You took the time to understand our processes: how we handle emails, responses, and tenant feedback. Then you adapted the tool to integrate seamlessly with our business software. It’s a bit like a custom solution."

We’d like to thank Haute-Savoie-Habitat for allowing us to conduct this interview.