Case study | Westward housing website and portal
Westwood Residents portal
Westward Housing Group is a development landlord, managing around 7,500 properties and Shared Ownership homes across the South West of England. Westward Housing Group also provides a range of services to people across the entire area, as well as employing over 300 people across the South West.
Across the South West of England the affordable housing sector is a top employer and plays a key role in the local economy—making a highly functional customer portal a key business tool.
The Challenge
Since 2012, Westward has offered its tenants and customers an online self-service portal using VerseOne’s Datafish product. Originally implemented using a combination of CSV files and webservices developed by Westward’s IT team, this year they decided to redevelop it in line with new digital transformation goals.
Westward wanted to provide its residents with more self-service functionality that is more closely connected to the housing management system. Their provider Capita offers a full set of webservices through Open Access, and after meetings with VerseOne to discuss the integration possibilities, Westward decided to rebuild their portal using this newly available, real-time information.
The Solution
The first stage of the project was to develop a proof of concept, which gave VerseOne the opportunity to show how the power of VerseOne CMS and Datafish could be deployed to work with Capita’s APIs.
The initial proof of concept demonstrated how a resident would sign up for the portal, log in, and view their rent statement. VerseOne also used the opportunity to extend the content editing capability of VerseOne CMS to give website editors at Westward more control over what personal information is displayed to portal users, and over how that information is displayed and styled on the screen.
Following the successful evaluation of the proof of concept, Westward and VerseOne put together a detailed specification of all of the different portal channels and how to recreate these using the Open Access technology.
Westward customers can register and log in to the portal securely and switch between tenancies, viewing rent and charges statements, information about their tenancy and housing officer, and review their repairs history and the status of current repair jobs to their property and estate.
