Who is Phoenix Community Housing

Phoenix Community Housing is a not-for-profit resident-led housing association based in south London that owns and manages more than 6,000 homes. They are the first resident-led housing association in London, with a unique operating model which empowers tenants and leaseholders to take a central part in decisionmaking and enables them to become shareholders of the organisation. 

Project background

In early 2021, Phoenix came to us with a challenge: Despite being in existence for over ten years, their existing customer portal only enjoyed an adoption rate of 14% among tenants and leaseholders. 

It wasn’t enabling Phoenix to live up to its ambitions to improve communications with residents, or contributing to fast, efficient resolution of their issues.

Solution

To deliver on Phoenix’s ambitions, we knew several factors needed to be addressed, most notably ensuring that the new platform worked flawlessly with other back-office systems to give tenants, residents and staff the information and capabilities they relied on most.

We knew that a critical consideration likely to affect resident adoption was just how much they could or could not do within the portal. We devised an extensive suite of functionality designed to cover all requirements;  integrating with both Phoenix’s newly adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform, as well as a legacy Orchard HMS instance.

Conclusion

The results have exceeded all expectations. Within just ten weeks we had surpassed our six-month target of 10% of resident adoption, and within six months the platform had welcomed more users than its predecessor had received in ten years – an excellent achievement that all members of the team are rightly proud of.