Top 5 Technologies for Housing Associations to Reduce Cost to Serve

*Updated 10 March 2025*

The housing sector faces immense challenges as demand continues to outstrip supply. With rising living costs in the UK, housing associations are under pressure to provide affordable, high-quality housing while managing operational efficiency. Digital transformation has become an essential tool in this effort, with advancements in technology revolutionising housing management and customer service. 

However, many housing associations struggle with outdated infrastructure and legacy thinking, making digital transformation a daunting task. It requires bold leadership and a commitment to change. In this article, we’ll highlight the most pressing concerns for housing associations and explore five key technologies that can help streamline operations, enhance customer service, and reduce costs. 

 

Top 6 Challenges for Housing Associations 

To create meaningful change, it’s essential to understand the key concerns that impact housing associations today: 

1. Funding & Budget Constraints - Government-imposed funding and rent cuts have made it increasingly difficult for housing associations to develop new housing and maintain existing properties. With limited resources, improving cost efficiency is crucial.
2. Employee Retention & Workforce Engagement - Aging workforces, outdated processes, and difficulty in attracting young talent create a need for modern solutions to streamline operations and improve workplace satisfaction.
3. Sustainability & Net-Zero Goals - Housing associations must meet ambitious environmental targets, such as reducing carbon emissions by 2050. Digital solutions can help optimise energy use and improve sustainability efforts.
4. Economic & Political Uncertainty - Global events, economic instability, and policy changes (such as Brexit) create unpredictability in funding, supply chains, and regulations, making strategic planning challenging.
5. Digital Transformation & Infrastructure Challenges - Legacy systems hinder efficiency and innovation. Many housing associations struggle with fragmented, outdated technology that impedes automation and customer service improvements.
6. Customer Expectations & Service Demand - Residents expect fast, seamless service. Housing associations must adapt to new communication channels and self-service options to enhance customer experience while reducing operational strain.

 

5 Technologies Transforming Housing Associations 

To address these challenges, housing associations must embrace modern technology to improve service delivery and reduce costs. Here are five critical technologies reshaping the industry: 

1. Cloud Computing for Scalable & Cost-Effective Operations

Cloud technology is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. Housing associations that transition to the cloud can benefit from: 

• Cost savings – Pay only for what you use, reducing infrastructure costs. 

• Scalability – Expand digital services as needed, particularly during peak times (e.g., winter maintenance surges). 

• Security & Compliance – Leading cloud providers invest heavily in cybersecurity, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations. 

• Integration & Automation – A cloud-based ecosystem allows seamless integration with digital services like AI-driven chatbots and self-service portals. 

 

1.AI-Powered Self-Service & Virtual Assistants

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising customer service with self-service tools that empower residents and reduce pressure on contact centres. 

• Chatbots & Virtual Assistants – AI-powered assistants like Bizibot and handle routine enquiries, reducing call volume and wait times. 

• 24/7 Availability – Unlike human agents, AI tools are available around the clock to provide instant responses to common queries. 

• Automated Workflows – AI can process maintenance requests, rent inquiries, and welfare support without human intervention. 

2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Efficiency

RPA automates repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable human resources. Here’s how it enhances efficiency: 

• Automated Maintenance Requests – AI-assisted RPA logs service requests, schedules repairs, and updates customers without manual input. 

• Rent Processing & Payment Reminders – Streamlining rent collection and notifications improves payment compliance. 

• Application Processing – Automating tenant applications and renewals speeds up approvals and enhances accuracy. 

3. IoT & Smart Housing for Proactive Property Management

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming housing management through real-time monitoring and automation: 

• Smart Sensors – Detect leaks, mold, and energy usage issues before they become costly problems. 

• Remote Maintenance – IoT-enabled devices allow housing associations to address maintenance needs proactively, reducing emergency repair costs. 

• Energy Efficiency – Smart thermostats and lighting controls help reduce utility costs and support sustainability goals. 

4. Digital Engagement & Gamification for Workforce & Residents

Improving engagement is key to increasing satisfaction for both employees and tenants. 

• Gamification for Staff – Contact centre agents benefit from game-based incentives that boost motivation, productivity, and retention. 

• Resident Engagement Platforms – Digital platforms improve communication between housing providers and tenants, offering easy access to service requests, payment portals, and community forums. 

• Personalised Communication – AI-driven insights enable personalised outreach to residents, addressing concerns before they escalate. 

 

The Future of Housing Associations 

Digital transformation isn’t a one-time event—it’s an ongoing journey. Housing associations that embrace modern technology will not only improve operational efficiency but also enhance tenant satisfaction, reduce costs, and meet sustainability goals. 

By implementing cloud computing, AI-driven self-service, RPA, IoT solutions, and gamification strategies, housing associations can build a more resilient and future-ready organisation. The time to act is now—standing still is no longer an option. 

At Britannic, we help housing associations navigate digital transformation with our Five-Point Plan: Discover, Demonstrate, Design, Deliver, and Develop. Whether it’s upgrading your infrastructure, deploying AI chatbots, or automating key processes, we provide tailored solutions that drive real impact. 

Are you ready to future-proof your housing association? Get in touch today to start your digital transformation journey! 

5 Technologies that Solve Real Problems for Housing Associations

Contact centres play a crucial role. For housing, the contact centre is a central hub for all customer service. Though often overloaded with calls and extensive wait times, with new exciting technology, you’re empowered to create an experience for your customers that you can be proud of.

There are five key technologies that housing associations should be considering in order to take action during this time of digitisation. All are crucial to improving the customer experience and reducing costs.

Harnessing the power of the Cloud

Cloud is far from new, but it’s vital because it enables you to wave goodbye to that clunky infrastructure. Which degree of cloudiness is your contact centre? (If any). With reliance falling heavily on legacy systems, this is technology that housing associations are reluctant to rely on. However in this digital world, cloud is vital for all businesses.

There’s plenty of options to choose from, you can go for public, private or a mixture of both (hybrid cloud). We encourage housing associations to do more than dip their toe in and extend their use of cloud beyond the contact centre.

There are several key benefits that can deliver for housing associations; some are likely to bust any perceived myths you’ve got going round and round in your head.

• It’s low cost – despite some assumptions, yes moving to the cloud will save you money (and make you money), without a doubt. With the cloud payment model, you only pay for what you use.
• It’s flexible and scalable – Cloud is like elastic, it stretches as far as you need; without breaking! For example, during particularly busy times like in winter, notorious for boilers breaking, you’ll be able to scale to meet the demand.
• Building blocks to more exciting technology – You can’t proceed with your exciting digital transformation plans without having the right infrastructure in place first. Cloud provides the right platform for many other plugin technologies and solutions that you can rapidly deploy.
• Security – Key perceived myths about cloud is that your data is more at risk. This is untrue, technology companies invest billions and billions into making their cloud platforms safe and secure.

All Britannic contact centre technology is cloud-based and integrates with your CRM. Enabling you to adapt quickly as your requirements change. You select the voice and UC services that suit your user groups, we’ll host and manage the applications for you.

Introducing Self-Serve

Resources within housing associations are scarce and yet, there’s so much work incoming constantly that self-serve technologies are going to become vital for the sector. Imagine if you could free your agents from the menial work and enable customers to serve themselves in more scenarios and how much of an impact this would have on the customer experience, your productivity levels and being able to hang onto talent.

Inundated with requests and queries; housing association’s contact centres are overflowing with actions that could be left to a digital agent, like Bizibot.

Ami is the first digital agent that learns from having real conversations with customers and colleagues. Using content from trawling your website, she’ll take the drudge away from your contact centre staff. Conversational AI is there to complement your employees and free them from menial work, not replace them.

Housing associations can utilise Conversational AI to help deal with maintenance, generic and welfare enquiries. There’s no need for a human to intervene unless your customer requests or if the situation is too complex for Ami to handle. Unlike people, Conversational AI is available 24/7, 365 and doesn’t need any drinks to help maintain maximum performance.

WebRTC is another key way that you can help to introduce self service into your housing association. For example, our solution WebCall enables you to enrich your customer service with solutions that enable click-to-call on your website or app, text chat and click to video chat. Creating a seamless transition and resulting in the customer being able to help themselves. No routing around trying to find phone numbers or waiting for a call back. Just real-time communication at your customer’s fingertips.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

With RPA, Self Service technologies, Ami for example, get taken to the next level. Making entire processes easy and seamless without the need for any human interaction. Logging a maintenance request for example, like a faulty boiler in your customer’s home.

A fully automated process with the power of our clever RPA capabilities might look like:

1. Customer reports a faulty boiler via Ami  
   They give details, attach pictures and give a date and time when someone from maintenance can come round to fix the issue. 
2. Ami utilises RPA to report the issue 
   She pulls through all the details the customer gave to her and logs all information with the maintenance request. 
3. RPA informs the maintenance team of the date and time when they can go round to fix the issue for the customer  
   The appointment is booked automatically with the engineer, likely spares required are booked out, and they are able to go out and complete the job.  
4. The customer is sent a confirmation of the maintenance appointment  

A task that previously might have meant that your customer was sat on hold for what seemed like an eternity; now made painless. There are so many more processes that these RPA scenarios can be replicated for within housing associations like booking in appointments for viewing houses, rent arrears and when maintenance has been completed.  

Gamification to increase agent productivity and motivation

Digital transformation is changing the face of being a contact centre agent, along with many other job roles. In the future, contact centre agents will become more proactive customer service points of contact for housing associations. With menial jobs taking up such a large amount of contact centre agent time currently, their job is reactive. With new technologies like Conversational AI and RPA emerging, the role of the contact centre agent will be able to become increasingly proactive. As the role of the contact centre agent changes, housing associations need to find new ways to engage and motivate their employees. It’s crucial for attracting and retaining the top-class customer service talent.

We know that a key issue for contact centres is how they can keep their employees engaged and empowered. Particularly in housing associations where resource is stretched to the limit. Gamification in the contact centre has arrived.

Utilising gamification in your contact centre enables you to produce motivated and engaged employees. Our solution enables you to host tournaments, game battles, map user performance against process automation, reward and give recognition and much more!

Digital Transformation for Housing Associations

You might not think this should be a priority for the sector, but housing associations must embrace and act upon the digital shift. Standing still when you’re in the housing sector is just not an option. The government pressures faced are a reason to move forward; do not stay static.

Now is the time for housing associations to adapt to financially survive. According to Inside Housing, the portfolio of assets for housing associations is to:

• Contribute to increasing their housing stock, with a commercial focus to drive profit and value creation
• Deliver social value with more affordable, quality and safe accommodation
• Provide adequate resources to support their tenants including the most vulnerable in our society.

Digital transformation has the power to help the housing sector do more than just survive financially but to thrive and disrupt.

However, it’s important to remember that digital transformation is a never-ending journey, a series of smaller projects. Some of which might just mean getting the right infrastructure in place. That’s right, not all digital transformation projects are something revolutionary and a big change. You might just start with a migration to SIP, which isn’t something your customers (or even your employees) will necessarily notice, but it’s an essential cog in creating the bigger, better picture.

Deconstructing your digital transformation is vital and so is roadmapping your journey. If you want successful projects that avoid a scope creep nightmare and achieve your business goals, you need a suitable plan in place.

At Britannic we’ve got the Five Point plan methodology. Having recently implemented it with one of the UK’s leading housing associations, we know it’s a great fit for making sure your projects are delivered: on time, on budget and more than meet expectations.

Using the Five Point Plan, we were able to successfully implement a resilient Mitel contact centre. Part of the wider project to transform the organisation’s communications. With ideas to later introduce more innovative ways of communicating with tenants through text messages and Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC). Meaning that the housing association will be able to talk to its customers through the channels they want to communicate with the organisation.

The methodology itself centres around Five Points: Discover, Demonstrate, Design, Deliver and Develop.

Each stage ensures the success of the digital transformation project. Through Digital Discovery Sessions, Britannic can understand your current technology, business processes and working practices and your reporting and KPI capabilities. Working with business decision-makers and senior IT people to explore ideas and communication technologies that support process automation, improve customer experience and make day-to-day interactions easy for your employees, customers and suppliers.