5 Ways Power Platform Can Transform Your Housing Association

Many housing providers are familiar with Microsoft’s range of tools. There’s Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) of course, and many housing associations already use Dynamics 365 CRM on a daily basis.

But Microsoft actually has a lot more to offer. And in our experience, housing associations stand to benefit significantly.

Power Platform is more than “just another Microsoft app” - it’s there to help your users create their own IT solutions, “automate everything possible” (Microsoft’s words, not ours), and make data-driven decisions like never before.

We chatted with our housing transformation experts to unlock Power Platform’s value-driving secrets and explore 5 practical opportunities that it can offer to housing associations and providers.

What is Power Platform Truly Capable Of?

Microsoft Power Platform allows you to create your own web apps, digital automations, secure web forms, and data/reporting dashboards - all of which can be optionally enhanced with AI. Its low code/no code development environment means that your employees don’t have to be computer programmers in order to create practical, meaningful solutions for their teams.

The Power Platform Suite consists of four main pillars:

• Power Apps - Gives your team the tools to build their own web apps in-house with Microsoft’s intuitive low code/no code infrastructure.
• Power Automate - Lets you automate tedious, manual tasks so your teams can get on with the job of helping your customers and prospects. Automations can be further enhanced by artificial intelligence.
• Power Pages - Create secure web forms and information portals for back-office teams, customers, field personnel, and more.
• Power BI & Fabric - Reach meaningful insights quicker with Microsoft’s industry leading data reporting tools; all of which can be further enhanced with automations, AI, data connectors, and Power Apps.

In short, if you can think up an app or automation, you can probably make it in Power Platform. And what’s more, upgrading to Power Platform is surprisingly cost-effective for those already using other enterprise applications like Dynamics 365.

5 Transformational Opportunities for Housing Associations to Use Power Platform

Optimising, Streamlining & Digitising Critical Processes

Housing providers often have to juggle numerous processes with a lot of moving parts.

Just think of all of the different workflows that go into each tenant or property. That could involve legal paperwork, wellbeing case management, decants, community engagement, arrears management, rent support, adaptation requests, communal area management, mutual exchanges, the “move in, move out” cycle, and more; all of which require their own workflows and documentation.

When left as manual processes, your teams may end up tying themselves up in knots simply doing the basic manual admin, with no time or mental energy left to spot problems or add extra value. However, when these tedious workflows are laid out, streamlined, automated, and digitised with the help of Power Platform, your teams will be able to focus less on paper-pushing and more on providing real value to customers.

To give just one example, to commission an app just to handle move-ins, move-outs, and manual exchanges could be costly, and may struggle to achieve meaningful ROI. However, Power Platform puts the tools to create apps like these in the hands of those who are closely familiar with these processes - letting them build a solution that is totally tailored to their needs and is adjustable over time as your organisation develops.

Provide Customer Self-Service Options

No housing provider wants to be the one who makes their customers wait on the phone during an emergency - nor simply for an answer to a straightforward question. Power Platform enables fuss-free customer self-service options too.

Establishing secure, online self-service portals using Power Pages lets your customers raise queries, flag concerns, or even report a housing emergency.

This saves customers the potential irritation and inconvenience of being tethered to the phone, waiting in a queue, when they likely have other things to be doing. It also saves your contact centre staff from being on the receiving end of that irritation, as well as eliminating the need for tedious data entry to record the call.

What’s more, Power Pages forms can integrate seamlessly with apps and data held across your Microsoft ecosystem. Power Platform’s AI tools can be used to triage, escalate, and forward each form entry, getting it in front of the right team ASAP.

Create Your Own Secure, IT-Approved Custom Apps

Being able to create your own apps, self-service portals, and digital workflows is only part of the equation.

If the IT that an employer provides doesn’t fulfil all of a team’s needs, they may end up using IT that is outside of the authorised IT infrastructure (called “shadow IT”) to simply do their jobs. However, using IT that your techies don’t know about can present significant risk for the organisation - not least the possibility of a cyberattack or data breach.

Other times, in an attempt to solve every department’s myriad IT needs, an organisation's tech stack becomes overly inflated and increasingly hard to manage.

Neither situation is ideal. As IT stacks grow, they become harder to govern and secure. And if the IT department doesn’t even know that certain tools are being used (as with shadow IT) they are completely blind to any security or operational issues on the horizon.

However, adopting a system like Power Platform completely sidesteps both issues. Power Platform allows your teams to create, adapt, and improve their own apps and automations; all of which can be further enhanced with extensive data connectors, Power BI/Fabric data integrations, and Copilot AI.

So, your teams have the freedom to improve their own processes by creating their own apps and your IT teams have complete visibility into what those apps do, so it’s easier to govern and secure them. Both of which keep the wheels of industry turning securely.

Improve Property Management & Repair Efficiency

Repairs and property management can be a complicated beast for any housing association to tame.

Merely coordinating repair cases, decants, site surveyors, community personnel, wellbeing teams, repair contractors, and more could be a full-time job in itself. When you add a whirlwind of separate IT tools, spreadsheets, and even (shock, horror) paper systems into the mix, you get a recipe for lost productivity and unnecessary data entry.

But the administrative faff isn’t the only problem here. The deeper issue is more one of communication happening in different formats, over different channels, and via different teams.

Tools like Power Platform provide a highly interconnected, cohesive IT system that all teams directly feed their operational actions and updates into; whether that’s flagging property observations, raising wellbeing concerns, reporting the results of a customer meeting, lodging repair requests, marking the progress of repair work, and so on.

No longer is this data locked up as a note on a clipboard or a cell in a spreadsheet. Observations get fed into the system first and foremost, where they can be properly triaged by AI and automatically forwarded to the right team to address ASAP.

Measure, Grow, and Deepen Your Social Value

Housing providers are always on the lookout for ways to measure and improve their social impact. Providing safe, enjoyable housing is an essential social good, and one that creates happy, fulfilled customers. And happy customers are good for an organisation's reputation, which is good for business.

However unhappy customers can be very bad for business. Poor reviews and word of mouth can be enough of a thorn in a housing provider’s side. But disgruntled customers may start withholding rent and reporting property complaints to the council rather than yourselves.

It’s for this reason that the core of any housing provider’s business is operations: solving problems, giving people safe haven, and providing a property your tenants are proud to call home.

By managing all of your properties, customers, operations, services, and contact centre functionality within one seamlessly interconnected system, that system becomes a central, holistic source of business truth. This is invaluable for gathering metrics like customer satisfaction and sentiment.

With this data to hand, you can understand your average customer’s feelings towards you as a provider, see how different problems trend throughout the year, explore repair turnaround times, identify common flashpoint issues, and more. You can even task AI to carry out predictive analysis and flag potential maintenance concerns ahead of time.

Using this data, you can then start to address common drivers of customer dissatisfaction, proving your commitment to being a proactive and caring provider.

Use Power Platform to Its Fullest with Crimson

Looking to adopt AI across your whole business estate? Interested in maximising your potential with Power Platform and other Microsoft enterprise products? Look no further than Crimson’s Art of the Possible® consultative workshops.

During these workshops, our experts can help you identify potential applications of Microsoft's suite of tools to enhance productivity, create efficiencies, build value, and foster innovation. We’ll help you realise the full hidden potential within Power Platform whilst helping you align tech opportunities with your business goals.

If you’re looking to get serious about Power Platform, then get our experts in your corner. Book your free consultation with our housing transformation team today.