B3Living’s strategy for 2021-2024 is better futures, how do you see the rent team’s role supporting this and influencing these outcomes?

The rents team is fundamental to our better futures strategy. They ensure the organisation keeps going, by collecting the rent, and they also ensure that our customers can stay in their homes and not face any future housing crises. Better futures sums it up really, they are ensuring the better future of the organisation and a better future for our customers.

As a team, they’re about so much more than just income collection. Our colleagues really know our customers, they know what additional support is out there and they have really good links in the community generally so they can really focus on sustainment.

Your customer ethos is “a personalised and inclusive service” how has RentSense helped with this?

When we call someone, it’s about them. There’s no script. Now it is much easier to focus and spend our quality time with customers who need it.

It means now they can give really targeted support.

For me that’s always been the business case for RentSense, and less of ‘can you do the same with fewer people’, but it’s more ‘can you help more people with the same size team’ and ‘can you really focus your resources around the people that need it the most’? I really notice that when I sit with this team now. They know customers by their voice. When you’re in financial hardship, someone really knowing and understanding your situation means a lot

When choosing suppliers/partners what qualities & synergies do you look for, and how has the partnership with Mobysoft evolved?

I have worked with Mobysoft before, and the service and product is tailored around the needs and parameters of each landlord. They also invest in the business relationship, which means the element of trust is there, which is fundamental for me.

With Mobysoft there is also a clear sense of shared values and outcomes, they have a real understanding of the issues and the sector and bring a lot of information and data together that’s hard to access elsewhere. So that understanding is data based and they flag to you what you need to be aware of.

The team regularly feedback and they have all consistently said everyone they have worked with at Mobysoft has been extremely responsive, so it is a really positive working relationship.

What difference has RentSense made?

What the team have now is a more focused approach, as they have fewer cases to sift through and more time. There a host of other benefits as well, for example now the system automatically predicts year end balances so we can check and verify direct debits are correct for year end. Also, if someone is off and we can get another officer to work their priority one cases.

We also have the safety net of knowing that cases aren’t missing with RentSense.

From a management perspective how beneficial are the reports?

You know what the workload is and everyone has visibility of this. It is easy to use and the reports help in so many ways, for example when being audited, I can press a button and give the auditors all the details they need.

Why and how have you used RentSense in the past and how has it helped and why has it been important?

Through Covid RentSense gave us the time to support our tenants, RentSense has helped us manage.

We have responded to the pandemic and focused on collecting with care, which RentSense has really supported. It really demonstrates the value of knowing your customers really well.

Has RentSense impacted job satisfaction of officers?

It has made a big difference. RentSense provides that safety net, we are not getting incorrect recommendations or trawling for cases that could’ve been missed off the list. We trust the RentSense algorithm and have a more concise workload.

How has the service been from Mobysoft since go live?

The service from Mobysoft was excellent. Everyone is really responsive, and for us it was obvious from the outset the people at Mobysoft understood income collection. When we went through the deployment they did not tell us the software works this way so we would need to. They listened to us, asked some great questions, and set the system around our needs.

Would you recommend RentSense to other users?