Webinar Review: Tackling No-Access Challenges In Housing

Amid regulatory change and internal cost pressures, housing organisations need to tackle no-access challenges head-on. Here are our two compelling reasons for this: firstly, to ensure tenants and customers feel safe in a well-maintained home, and secondly, to maintain compliance standards without vastly expanding resources.

In this webinar, we addressed these increasingly relevant challenges and explored a smarter way to approach compliance. We also welcomed Chris Marshall, Chief Operating Officer at Railway Housing Association, who shared how his experience with our Voicescape Compliance solution has driven engagement up and no-access rates down. 

Couldn’t attend? We’ve summarised the key takeaways from our Voicescape Compliance webinar below, highlighting how our multi-award winning solution can be deployed and adapted to help you achieve this within your own organisation. 

Facing sector-wide challenges together

Remaining compliant in today’s current climate is a tough balancing act for social landlords, and managing internal cost and resource pressures while adhering to stricter regulations is no easy task. This leaves many with a choice: do you expand your team, which can be expensive, or do you invest in intelligent automation to drive customer engagement and reduce no-access rates with the resources available to you?

From historical repair backlogs left over from the pandemic to the influx of new repairs due to increased awareness of damp, mould, and condensation (DMC) – compounding challenges and consistent no-access can make progress and adherence difficult. They also potentially interfere with your deeper mission to support customers and ensure they have safe, sustainable residences. 

Engaging with tenants is what your officers do best, but often the resource to do so is stalled by manual administrative tasks – such as calling tenants to book essential appointments, sometimes without success. This is where Voicescape Compliance can help, engaging customers and making rescheduling appointments easy. 

Introducing Voicescape Compliance

Through a combination of intelligent automation and human intervention, Voicescape Compliance facilitates increased customer engagement for seamless appointment booking. Our solution has proven to significantly reduce costly no-access when it comes to gas and electrical appointments, or responsive repairs and planned works. It optimises the booking process, improves the customer experience and manages cyclical workloads and backlogs efficiently. 

Voicescape Compliance can support DMC and stock condition visits too. It’s proven to help manage and monitor current and historic appointments, proactively engage after appointments to ensure issues are resolved and deliver proactive campaigns to promote best practice and prevent issues from arising.

How it works

Applying the data you share with us, we use intelligent automation to carry out the heavy lifting of outbound calling, freeing you up to have conversations with tenants who are available and want to talk. 

Automated calls are tailored, delivered with a local number and recorded with a familiar voice from within your organisation to encourage trust and improve engagement. They also offer customers the opportunity to confirm appointments without directly speaking to an operator, saving officers time and improving assurance of access. Should they wish to reschedule their appointment, they can quickly transfer themselves into your team for a conversation on their terms at a time of their choosing. 

To summarise, Voicescape Compliance gives organisations the opportunity to engage more with tenants ahead of time – without it impacting officers' resources. 

Multi-award winning solution in action

When you onboard Voicescape Compliance, you get more than a customer-supplier relationship. You get a dual partnership where we work together to leverage and adapt the solution in line with your teams’ and tenants’ specific needs. 

Our solution’s effectiveness has been recognised with two awards in 2025 that we couldn’t have won without the trust and collaboration from our clients:

• Best Supplier to the Social Housing Sector – ASCP Safety & Compliance Awards

• Most Innovative Property Service with Progress Housing Group – NHMF Conference Awards

For a more comprehensive understanding of how Voicescape Compliance works in action, we invited Railway Housing’s Chris Marshall to share his ongoing success story using the solution with webinar attendees. Here’s a roundup of his presentation.

Customer deep-dive with Railway Housing Association

Context and challenges:

• Small organisation but wide geographical footprint – 1,600 homes from Berwick to Hereford (same legal/regulatory responsibilities as larger organisations but with fewer resources)
• Recent restructuring identified priorities around regulatory compliance and resident feedback
• They have a dedicated compliance team and gas servicing is delivered in-house – both with limited resources
• Their new Asset Management Strategy for 2025-29 set a vision to become 100% compliant across all areas and a direction to use technology/AI
• Their Tenant Satisfaction Measures identified that a well-maintained, safe home is a main driver for satisfaction
• They previously used letters as contact for gas servicing, resulting in engineers driving long distances for appointments and not gaining access 

The solution:

• Railway Housing introduced Voicescape Compliance for gas servicing to modernise their approach, streamline the process and remove wasteful activities
• Our Customer Success team guided their team through system setup, going from sign-up to go-live in as little as 5-6 weeks, with limited-to-no IT input
• We embedded outbound automation to enable residents to engage when they wanted to through voice principles and reminder messages

Results:

• Significantly reduced no-access rate – reducing wasteful travel time for in-house engineers
• Automation has increased engagement rates, leading to more people contacting the organisation to rearrange appointments and enabling the team to replan more effectively
• Improved resident experience with really positive feedback around automated reminders and the ease of engagement, including voice or text options
• Driven a cultural change of proactivity with communication – not just in compliance servicing but for engagement across the spectrum
• The vast majority of Railway’s resident population is retirement living, and despite preconceptions that they would struggle with technology, feedback has proven that the solution has been really helpful and appreciated  
• Railway have leveraged the Voicescape suite of products beyond Compliance to collect feedback/satisfaction data and other direct engagement use cases, with engagement rates increased 
• They achieved a 75%+ engagement rate on their first satisfaction survey run with the solution

Future:

• Railway plan to apply the Compliance solution to electrical testing and use the wider Voicescape platform to engage customers around an annual resident visit

Reduce no-access rates and tackle compliance challenges with Voicescape

Through intelligent automation and increased engagement, you can bring about impactful change with the tangible benefits below. Not only can you improve your officers’ and tenants’ experience, but you can also work towards boosting compliance (or remaining 100% compliant) in cost-effective and resource-efficient ways. With Voicescape Compliance, you can:

• Reduce the cost and inefficiency around letters and increase team capacity
• Boost operational efficiency through automated outbound engagement
• Increase first-time access – with an average of a 20-30% reduction in no-access based on our customer experience
• Reduce operational costs of no-access – which average at £75 a time
• Improve tenant engagement for customers in a way that works for them

For a deeper dive into redefining tenant engagement to reduce the costs associated with no-access, download our whitepaper for free. Ready to chat with one of our experts and learn more? Get in touch with us directly.