Automated Contractor Communications for Housing Services

The Challenge

Blackwood Homes & Care was manually emailing over 7,000 reactive repair works orders to contractors each year. This process — treated as an “ad-hoc communication” — was time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to failure. The final step of actually sending the work order was sometimes missed, introducing avoidable delays and inconsistencies into a critical operational process.

The Solution

To address this, iStride developed a solution for bulk communications within Civica Cx. This automation triggers an email only to relevant contractors as soon as a work order reaches the “Issued” status, completely removing the need for staff to send emails manually. The solution was designed for efficiency and reliability, using sql procedures to ensure robust performance. It also reflected best practices drawn from others across the sector.

The Results

The new process guarantees that every work order is sent, removing the risk of missed communications and improving consistency across contractor workflows. It also saves the business around 2 hours per week in admin time — a small but meaningful gain that frees up staff for more value-added work. More importantly, it ensures that service delivery is more dependable, with fewer avoidable delays.

Take a look at these blog articles for how easy it can be to add rich custom content to your your communications:

www.istride.co.uk

Automated communications are only as good as the data they carry. In Civica Cx, built-in tags go a long way - but only so far. What if you want to pull in precise, situation-specific data into your emails, letters, or texts? That’s where Conditional Data Tags come in. And once you understand them, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them.Why Conditional Tags?Out of the box, Cx provides a limited set of built-in tags. But modern workflows demand flexibility. Its far too limiting to be cons

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Lets cut right to the chase....this is pretty specialist stuff. You either want to know it, or you are one of the 99.999999% of people out there who almost definitely don't know this even exists, or care.But....if you are that 0.000001% of people who do, then wouldn't it be great to find the answer right here!What on earth are Stored Procedures for Bulk Communications?One of the most powerful aspects of Cx is the communications engine. It is centred around the Contact, that central entity th

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In this post I show you how you can pull information field responses in to Communications Remove manual entry?, improve communication quality? reduce error? be more efficient?It’s been a while since I posted on here. 2024 didn’t start quite as I expected but we’re going to finish on a high. As a family we were incredibly lucky to not lose anyone to Covid, and in our small metaphorical and literal bubble, life was simpler. I had been grounded by BoJo and his chums. This did flip the way I work