Bromford wants to help our customers be the best they can be. Our society needs less dependant people on its precious financial resources. Our neighbourhoods and communities need to be balanced and self sufficient. Helping customers with their aspirations, with a range of goals they want to achieve, will make for better societies. A large number of our customers are dependent on us. We want customers to stand on their own two feet and become more self-reliant. We want to support customers to carry out their own transactions, services and contributions to their community. By providing information, advice, support and tools for customers to use in their daily lives through social media, we can start to help customers to turn around the generational habits that they may have been accustomed to and become self-sufficient. We’re always looking to improve and, with development of new technology and in particular, maximise the benefits of engaging in social media. Social media is a real area of digital growth for Bromford. Setting up the majority of accounts in 2011 to support communication around the UK riots, Bromford colleagues have spent three years honing and developing our social media service. Facebook and Twitter are now alternative and often preferable channels of communication for customers. As a social business, Bromford aims to encourage the use of social media for a self-service approach, where customers can find their own information and support themselves through our digital presence. We also aim to provide a personal human tone of voice through all communications and social customer service. Through sticky content and posting our original stories and multimedia, our channels aim to become the go to place for anyone in our homes, receiving support or whose lives we impact upon. Monitored from 8am -9pm, 365 days a year, our digital channels are helping to engage and build relationships with customers through pro-active and reactive conversations. Innovative in-house app development has also enabled customers to self-serve any time of the day or night. In the end our goal is simple; reducing pressure on our frontline customer service so more time can be spent helping customers to be the best they can be. As a not-for-profit organisation we don’t have budget for advertising so we signpost customers to our social media channels through external PR and communication. Our letterhead, email signatures, YouTube videos, website pages and maintenance vans all have social media logos promoting the different ways anyone can contact us. We also use our social media channels to promote topics of interest, events, jobs and volunteering opportunities in there area. We also post guides on money management including money saving tips, guides on moving home and links from external websites which we think will help to benefit our customers. It's not just about what is on our website, we want to help our customers find resources to benefit them, even if it is not from our own resources. Using Facebook, we take advantage of the internal 'banner' to promote campaigns and information we want to highlight to customers. For example, during the recent UK storms, using this banner we have encouraged customers to read our flood preparation advice from our website through this Facebook banner. We’ve created a Facebook page ‘Bromford Homeswap’ dedicated to customers looking to swap homes with other customers. Demand for this has increased due to recent changes to the UK benefits system. It allows customers to advertise the type of property they’re looking for and helps to increase their chances of finding an exchange. By providing this service, we are helping customers to face an adverse impact. Although this page is monitored, it has enabled our customer to self-serve and to find a home to their liking. It has reached over 782 ‘Likes’ since March 2013. We have already had enquiries from two other housing associations about how we created this page. We are beginning to identify trends within our customers’ contact requests and so produce tailored videos using YouTube, for example, ‘How to’ repairs, and self-help guides for our website. Our 'How to' video's are also available to view through an application from our Facebook page. We post these related video's and online guides to our customers when they post a question on our social media channels. By making applications and tools available online we reduce customer queries and help promote self-sufficiency. Our colleagues are encouraged to use an internal social network called 'Yammer'. Through this, colleagues share their stories, achievements and best practices. By sharing this information, aswell as on social media, colleagues can share help and advice with our customers through a wide ranging online knowledgebase. We also join Facebook groups in our operating areas to see what our communities are talking about. We can use this to help build relationships with our customers in our communities, help colleagues to be aware of particular issues, tailor content to promote in these areas and help improve our communities. Our social media for customer services are actioned by selected colleagues in our Contact Team who have a heightened knowledge of social media. To help provide a continual service, these colleagues monitor our social media channels up to 9pm, 7 days a week. By managing these channels on a weekend, we are helping our customers outside our working hours and showing we are not constrained to set times. Following a recent re-brand of our business, we have now merged our Facebook and Twitter channels into one page for customer services. This has helped to give our customers a central channel to communicate with us on and for us to provide the services to help our customers to be the best they can be. In the past 18 months we’ve seen a 60.3% increase in engagement through Twitter and 97.7% increase via Facebook. We currently have a combined social media following of 6,861. This is split between our 2 Facebook channels with a combined following of 2,339 and across 2 Twitter channels with a combined 4,522. By providing links to our webpages, our website has gained 3,009 click throughs from Facebook and Twitter. This can be from our own promotion or from other social media users linking back to our website. Our ‘How to’ video content has reached over 2,000 views on Youtube. Our video content on preparing customers for Welfare Reforms has gained 1,274 views. Our video content and animation is all done in house. For us, a key measurement of success on social media is through the examples of great service we provide for our customers and their anecdotal feedback and endorsement. Here is an example. A customer made contact on Facebook about exchanging with another landlord because he’d been offered a job in London but because of the rules around how long he’d been with Bromford he wasn’t able to exchange yet. We got all of the details about his circumstances and spoke to our lettings team. The nature of our work is helping people be the best they can be which meant that our rules shouldn’t get in the way of this man’s career. We were able to grant him a move. He later posted on our Facebook wall with “A big thanks to the Bromford team for listening to me and coming up with a solution. It shows that if you have a problem and contact them, a solution will be found.
http://www.facebook.com/thisisbromford http://www.twitter.com/bromfordhelp http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-home/report-a-repair/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-home/report-a-repair/how-to-with-bromford-repairs/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-home/report-a-repair/flooding-advice/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-home/report-a-repair/how-to-thaw-out-frozen-pipes/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-money/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-money/money-saving-tips/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-money/customer-offers/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/moving-home/want-to-swap-your-rented-home/swapping-your-home-faq/ http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/moving-home/want-to-swap-your-rented-home/moving-home-what-you-need-to-do/ http://www.youtube.com/BromfordGroup http://www.bromford.co.uk/my-bromford-account/my-home/report-a-repair/condensation-and-mould/
