Case Study - Leeds Federated CRM

Leeds Federated Housing Association

Leeds Federated Housing Association (LFHA) was formed in 1974 by a number of smaller associations coming together to form a 'federation' for the benefit of the community. The idea was that by working together they could achieve more than being separate organisations.

Forward thinking customer service delivery

Leeds Federated is a registered social landlord providing 4,000 homes in Leeds, Harrogate and Wakefield. With a large tenant base, the Customer Service Team were kept busy managing and updating customers (tenants) information, drawn from a number of disparate databases.

Committed to “building futures together” and delivering a continued high level of service, Leeds Federated recognised the benefits of prioritising areas for further development with the aim of continuing to keep the business efficient.

In line with their goals to continue as a high performing Association, LFHA required a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application capable of displaying a comprehensive view of their customers (tenants) using information drawn from a number of disparate databases, with the ability to record, view and manage details of all communications with their customers.

Our Approach

We had worked closely with Leeds Federated over recent years and before the term 'smart phone' was introduced, we had developed the “Mobile Task Manager” application for them. A revolutionary tool in it's time which they embraced, maximising on the available technologies to help them keep their running business efficiently.

With this new project, great care was taken throughout the analysis and development to ensure that our approach delivered a solid software business solution, where information could be retrieved quickly and remained easily accessible, ensuring the most important information would always be viewable.

Breeze IT's successful response to the tender was for a bespoke web based application utilising Microsoft's Silverlight technology, alongside ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005 which enriches the user journey and specifically allows the user to manage several customers' records simultaneously.

The Results

The results of our work delivered a cost effective, feature rich, fully integrated housing management system. A bespoke application, designed around Leeds Federated's specific business processes - and a delighted customer. We believe the alternative would be an expensive, slow and cumbersome off-the-shelf package that would require highly compromised, inefficient business processes to be designed to fit around it.

The bespoke CRM application helps Leeds Federated to manage their tenants and streamline all facets of tenant interaction. Using the secure CRM system, employees can easily identify individual tenant profiles, improve tenant relationships, maximize their landlord service, and develop tenant loyalty.

Customer, relationship and contact management within a dynamic, web based CRM has never been so easy!

I have found Breeze very good at getting involved with the numerous developments we've done in the last five years. Specifically their ability to help guide the functional specification in order to deliver a system that is fit for its purpose. For example the latest project CRM developed in Silverlight is a great example where numerous idea from Breeze helped the system to become really successful. The level of success here is reflected by what the users of the system say.

The after sales support is second to none. Any issues are being resolved usually pretty much immediately after the call is logged and because the support is provided by the people who wrote the software, there are no knowledge gaps and or delays in either fixing the problem or rolling back to a previous version. Upgrades are usually completed outside of “core” working hours at no extra cost, thus reducing system down time.

Breeze are a professional software development company and I would be only happy to recommend their services to anyone who is looking for a solid software business solution.
Lukas Bisek, IT Manager - Leeds Federated Housing Association