Woonstad Rotterdam wants to become a 'very reliable and committed landlord'. The way to get there: further improve customer contact and invest in CRM. Ziptone spoke with Robin van Dorland and Carline Nauta about the unusual choice for Salesforce in the Dutch corporate sector and its step-by-step implementation.  

 

One in six Rotterdam residents has to deal with housing association Woonstad Rotterdam. That seems like a simple starting point for CRM, but the opposite is the case in practice. The corporation rents out social housing, private sector housing, offices and shops and parking spaces. In addition, Woonstad also has complexes in which homeowners' associations play a role. Woonstad also buys and sells housing association homes and operates 6.000 student homes. All that real estate must also be made more sustainable and in many cases the renewal of the foundation as a result of changing groundwater levels is also on the agenda. And just like any other corporation, Woonstad has to deal with multiple urban problems.

Recognizing customers

To become a 'very reliable and committed landlord' you must have an eye for your customers, work hard and have good systems, processes and data flows. Robin van Dorland, customer contact manager: “At the end of 2022, we identified our problems and conducted in-depth interviews with other operational departments involved. Most departments encountered similar issues: think of the hassle of clearly registering and recognizing customers, problems with accessing documentation, or a lack of analysis options due to fragmented data.”

Robin van Dorland has been customer contact manager at Woonstad Rotterdam for seven years and in that role is responsible for the customer contact center. He is also concerned with the role of customer contact within the organization. Van Dorland previously worked as Senior Business Unit Manager at Teleperformance for bol.com.

 

New blueprint

After the necessary thinking, a new blueprint of the customer architecture has been drawn up. In order to realize its service ambitions, Woonstad wants to have a 360-degree customer view and be able to closely monitor what is happening with customers. Van Dorland: “The blueprint was drawn up in consultation with all stakeholders and presented to the management in June 2023. A major survey was also conducted among our customers and the reference architecture of our umbrella organization, Aedes, was examined.”

Woonstad has taken a remarkable step in the planning process: the CRM functionality is being separated from the housing association-specific ERP solution. This solution includes, for example, functionalities related to real estate management, technical management and finance.

Look around at other organizations

Carline Nauta: “Immediately after the agreement on the blueprint, a program of requirements was drawn up in the summer. From the longlist of 24 CRM solutions, we arrived at a shortlist of three solutions. We entered into discussions with this and demos were assessed by a multidisciplinary team on our side. You will also, of course, visit organizations in other sectors, such as online retailer Bol – to gain inspiration about customer value – or TUDelft, where we viewed the house of the future.”

Carline Nauta is a Business Consultant for digital innovation & transformation at Woonstad Rotterdam. “In the distant past I spoke on the phone here as a student. After some wanderings, I became a consultant in IT. My last job was at KLM, after which I thought: I am looking for opportunities to make more impact.” This is how Nauta came back on board at Woonstad, where she manages the digital transformation in the customer domain as a senior product owner: “I am between IT and business, also for CRM, for which Salesforce is used.”

What captured (and continues to appeal to) Nauta and Van Dorland's imagination is what they saw during an event by a large number of housing associations in the United Kingdom, which (more often than happens in the Netherlands) had chosen Salesforce. For example, groups of Salesforce end users were assigned the task of developing a new complaints process. “We had drawn up a process in four hours, which was in Salesforce an hour later. If you want to do that in an application like Wocas, it can easily take six months,” says Nauta.

Not exactly the standard in corporate land

Salesforce is a world standard, according to Van Dorland, but not exactly the standard in the corporate world. “We opted for a solution that has a lot of development power. There is another corporation in the Netherlands that we know has been working with Salesforce for several years. Our board of directors supported the decision, but there was a well-substantiated plan and a clear ambition to reach the top as a corporation.”

Around the turn of the year, a contract was concluded with Salesforce and with an implementation partner, Cobra. “They are at home in our sector, but it was also the best match in terms of cultural fit,” Nauta emphasizes, “We started in February.”

Agile approach to implementation

Salesforce is not a small application. Woonstad Rotterdam has consciously opted for a step-by-step implementation, so that the focus can always be placed on value and speed can be achieved, Nauta explains. “Every two weeks we deliver some new functionality. When you tie up time and costs, you run the risk of ending up with nothing. In any case, the starting point is that we choose to do one thing very well and complete it completely. Only then will we move on to something else and see what else we can do with the budget that has been made available for this. We don't yet know exactly how far we will get with this. For example, it is not yet entirely clear which things we can gradually reuse so that new projects cost less time and less money.”

How data plays an essential role

“We started with the most important and simple things, because we are still learning. One of the most important things is transferring all the data,” Nauta explains. “We want to work in two systems next to each other for as short a time as possible, with one system being synchronized with the other.”

Those data play an important role, according to Van Dorland. “In which houses do which complaints such as mold occur? Until now, to get a good picture of this, we had to collect data from every nook and cranny. One of our most extensive and complex processes concerns maintenance. There is a lot to gain there. For example, by providing the customer with better and more targeted information and by properly informing the contractor who is going to carry out an assignment in advance, even if a subcontractor is hired. Salesforce can also play a role in this area. We also want to route telephone contacts from Unexus to Salesforce Service Cloud.”

Who is the customer?

Salesforce must also accommodate the multitude of roles and personas within Woonstad Rotterdam. Van Dorland: “It is important how we can properly identify the person who is calling or seeking contact in some other way. Because it could be a tenant or owner of a home, but also a local police officer, administrator or a neighborhood team member who calls about a home or about a tenant. The local police officer or administrator can also be a tenant with us. Administrators can call about different addresses and their involvement also has a clear start and end point.”

Nauta adds: “If someone comes to clean a porch, should the resident or administrator be informed in advance? We can't properly record things like that right now. We also do business with healthcare companies that purchase services or even an entire complex from us. It also happens that today a resident calls about a leaking tap and tomorrow the resident's son calls about the other person's tap, while they both rent from Woonstad Rotterdam. In this way we have mapped out multiple personas and dozens of different roles.”

Chain-oriented thinking and action

Acting more from the chain instead of just the isolated (sub) process is one of the other challenges that Woonstad Rotterdam faces. Does every report of a defective elevator in a residential complex lead to a repair order or is the first report sufficient? The customer contact center is an important data source for the rest of the organization: if many maintenance complaints are received, this can also be a reason to schedule large-scale maintenance.

Implementation partner Cobra will help Woonstad Rotterdam with the implementation of Salesforce, but the intention is that Woonstad Rotterdam will also invest in its own competencies. Nauta: “Super users have been designated within Woonstad Rotterdam, who not only have a role in testing, but can also make improvement proposals. These can also be employees in the customer contact department - they have previously thought about what information should be placed on the agent desktop - but they can also be super users from other departments.” This so-called relationship map is now in basic form.

Migration of data and knowledge articles

One of the next steps is to move source data. “The condition for this is that we can integrate and link with other systems,” says Nauta. “For example, that specific step will ensure that we can better identify our stakeholders; this primarily concerns owners who are in a different system. And there are quite a few buyers whose historical data is also in our rental systems.”

Also on the wish list is tackling the knowledge documents. The knowledge articles will all be transferred to Salesforce. Due to the lack of good tooling, documentation on warranty schemes for lifts, for example, also ended up in the knowledge base, which is now somewhat contaminated. Nauta: “Once knowledge articles are included in Salesforce, we will also be able to better monitor their use. But here too, we are not going to examine everything; the current knowledge has been validated and is also on the website – and you want to continue to accelerate.”

Speed ​​up processes, customer satisfaction to at least an 8

“The dream is that we can work in a smarter and more efficient way, bringing more to the front so that you can help a customer faster. It is easier to build integrations with Salesforce, which is very positive for many departments, but is not possible at the moment,” says Van Dorland. “If customers complete and send a web form today, it will be sent to me tomorrow and the day after tomorrow it will be delivered to the correct department. That's already two days that don't add anything.”

Bottom line, Salesforce must contribute to higher customer satisfaction at Woonstad Rotterdam. “We want to be a reliable and committed landlord. For now and for later. Our goal is that 75 percent of our customers give an 8 or higher. And on the other hand, we also want to reduce the percentage of customers who give us a 5 or lower. Those customer satisfaction figures are mainly a result of something else, namely how you help your customers. So that figure will automatically increase if we manage to improve ourselves.”

 

City of Rotterdam is a 100% Rotterdam housing association where residents can go at any time in their lives, from young to old, from student room to elderly home. The corporation stands for “good service, good maintenance and a little help when necessary”. This is further refined in the corporate vision in the form of three 'daring goals' according to Woonstad Rotterdam; 'Our residents find us to be a very reliable and committed landlord' is the top priority.

From Woonstad Rotterdam's business strategy: “Customers and residents do not always see us as reliable and involved. In general, we are doing better and scoring higher on the Aedes benchmark, but we also see that there are people who are not satisfied with the contact with us or with the handling of complaints and repair requests. We sometimes do not communicate in a timely manner or clearly enough about important matters such as work or rent increases.” In 2023, almost 287.000 contacts were handled by Woonstad Rotterdam's customer contact center.

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

Case, Customer Experience, Featured Salesforce