Today, being a successful social landlord isn’t just about bricks and mortar. It’s about having a communications network that can efficiently co-ordinate staff, suppliers and contractors. That gives you what you need to look after your properties – and the tenants that live in them – properly. So if your basic building block is a 56K modem and a dial-up connection that isn’t always 100% reliable, you could probably do with some serious rebuilding work.
With 20,000 tenants and 8,700 properties, this was exactly the position North Hertfordshire Homes found itself in. As the largest registered social housing provider in Hertfordshire, the organisation needed to share lots of information between many different people across a multiplicity of sites – and it was becoming a problem.
As Sante Giancola, ICT Manger at North Hertfordshire Homes remembers: “It was vital that we improved day-to-day communications between sites. Processing urgent enquiries and keeping staff up-to-date was proving to be a challenge as each site operated in a standalone capacity. We are continually looking to add value in everything we do. The team identified that enhancing our communications capabilities would vastly raise our standards in customer service.”
Making the difference
Our Ethernet Extensions opened the door to an easier way of working by speeding up telephone services and internet access as well as giving North Hertfordshire Homes data transfer between sites they could rely on.
Linking up the networks across the organisation’s sites meant faster, easier and simpler collaboration for staff, suppliers and contractors.
And that meant tenants and properties got the attention they needed – sooner rather than later.
Building for the future
Within just 10 months, seven sites were connected to the main office in Letchworth – delivering great voice and data communications and producing significant savings too through network convergence.
But we didn’t leave it there. We also made sure that new connections would be quick and simple to roll out to future sites so that the old problems never came back.
Sante appreciates the good housekeeping: “We now have a robust, powerful system which has changed the way in which our headquarters communicates with our repairs depot and other sites throughout the region.
Our scalable, cutting-edge infrastructure ensures that we are well placed to react speedily to further site expansion plans as they arise in future.”
North Hertfordshire Homes case study
