“Since its foundation in 2005, Gloucester City Homes has undergone a massive amount of change,” explained Lee Wade, CEO at Exponential-e. “It has successfully transitioned from operating as an arm’s length management organisation with all its ICT infrastructure and services being provided by the local council to an independent body with complex backend demands controlling everything from renewing tenancy agreements to managing burst drains.”
As part of the engagement, Gloucester City Homes wanted to ensure its IT infrastructure refresh would result in better customer service standards. Since all services are delivered down a single piece of fibre, Gloucester City Homes has the flexibility to easily scale or adapt its infrastructure to meet its changing needs. In addition, Exponential-e provides constant managed service support and security assurance so that Gloucester City Homes doesn’t have to invest large amounts of resource in managing the system.
“In just a short space of time, we’ve already seen the benefits that a secure and stable infrastructure delivers. Staff can now move from a desk to a meeting room to home and pick up their desktop in exactly the same state as they left it,” explained Lesley Williams, Head of IT at Gloucester City Homes. “This makes a huge difference and provides us with an opportunity to deliver better assistance. For example, we recently underwent a programme where our 5,200 tenants needed to renew their tenancy agreements as part of our separation from the council. Previously this would have been a manual, paper-based process. However, the flexibility of the infrastructure means we have been able to use a combination of mobile and laptops to run events that allow people to refresh their agreements from designated locations throughout the city, something that was more convenient for our tenants and enabled more efficient processing.”