Trailblazing bot nets national award!

The ingenious tool saw us triumph in the Innovator of the Year category at a presentation ceremony in Manchester.

Our staff developed the bot in response to changes requiring landlords to verify all rent increases on the national Universal Credit (UC) Landlord Portal.

And its success has led to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) giving official approval for other landlords to follow suit, with our expert help.

Kay Glew, our Director of Operations, said: “The switch to verification of all rent increases presented us with a colossal challenge as we had more than 13,000 customers in receipt of UC and just one month in which to process the changes.

“We worked out that we’d need to divert 48 staff to work on nothing other than this administrative task for a whole month at the expense of spending time helping our customers, and that this would also generate an overtime cost of around £70,000.

“So, we did what we do best at times of challenge and in keeping with our ‘Better Together’ culture, we assembled a project team of talented colleagues from across Thirteen and created a bot capable of processing these changes.

“This innovation has reduced our costs, freed up our staff to talk to customers at a time their rent was increasing, and we also believe it contributed towards a drop in year-end debt from 3.22% in March 2023 to 2.9% in March 2024.

“We’ve since shared our learning with other social landlords to run a pilot, which has ultimately led to the Department for Work and Pensions giving its official approval for use of bots in verifying new claims across the sector.”

The Inside Housing judging panel for the award praised the project for finding a solution to a “real and pressing problem”.

“It reflected creative thinking outside the box, demonstrates tangible, measurable and significant positive outcomes and is replicable across the sector,” the panel added.