Client Successes

Enhancing Public Housing Self-Service

Midwestern Public Housing Authority – Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly Section 8 Housing)

Challenge

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program for a major mid-west city had just undergone a significant call center challenge.  Their average wait time for a caller was over an hour.  Tenants, those that either were already part of the HCV program or wanted to become part of it, and landlords, those that either owned property to be rented or acted on the owner’s behalf, were frustrated by this log-jam.  Worse, HCV had implemented a self-service platform for both of these groups, and it was not being used. 

The client’s IT team had relied upon an outside vendor to develop the initial self-service platform.  That vendor had since gone out of business, leaving IT and the business leads without a mechanism to update the environment.

The self-service platform, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR), was developed with almost no regard to business needs.  The vendor had not developed any requirements documents or design schematics to start from.  The existing IVR had limited database access, retrieving data from one of the three platforms used by HCV.  Finally, the IVR didn’t really work…providing information that was either incorrect or sending the caller to the agent queue, a key factor in creating the extended wait times.

Approach and Results

Our first step was to analyze the current call types into the call center.  We looked at the two caller types, Tenants and Landlords. While there were overlaps, generally each had their own set of needs.  This was captured by looking at the volumes of call types over the prior twelve-months.  With this data, we then determined the most common inquiries for both Tenants and Landlords.  Given the previously limited ability of the IVR to access the back-end databases, the team aligned each of the call types to the source system.

The single biggest reason that Tenants call in is for information on when they will be eligible to move from their current HCV property. This information is not kept in any database, but on paper.  Calls about their move cannot be resolved until the paperwork is completed. We built an IVR that determined if it was less than 30 days since they submitted their move paperwork.  If so, then the IVR informed them that it would take up to 30 days to process their move request, and information would be available from agents at that time.

The IVR call flows were then developed by working with the business owners.  The CVP team drafted flows based upon best practices and the callers most likely to self-serve against the most popular reasons to call.  Each prompt was developed in concert with the business – what the proper wording was, who would speak it, and when it was needed.

Once executive buy-in was received, including agreement that the IVR call flow was in concert with business needs, development of the revised IVR took place with rigorous testing by the development team.  CVP created a user acceptance testing plan that was provided to the business owners for their execution.  CVP trained the client team on the execution, so that they could tailor the test cases as necessary.   Execution of the test cases provided some minor updates to the IVR call flow, which were performed, a re-test took place, and the IVR call flows were handed over to IT for their implementation.

CVP worked closely with the IT team to confirm access to the back-end databases and provided a detailed transition so IT could support the application upon project completion.  During the project lifecycle, meetings with the CIO and his team occurred weekly, and a final transition meeting was held to ensure the client team understood the best practices needed to maintain and update the IVR.

CVP left HCV with a robust, extensible platform for their implementation, utilizing the most common inquiries.  Along with the training to transfer knowledge, CVP also left HCV with a complete design guide and implementation handbook.