Housing Digital Innovation Awards - Best Online Service winner

In October 2020, we launched Basil Bot – a state-of-the-art chatbot, which has transformed our customer service offer in the space of a year.

Months of strategy work by the team resulted in the creation of Basil Bot. Taking its name from our founder, Basil Jellicoe, Basil Bot is the customers’ first point of contact if they interact with us online. The system is an omnichannel, which makes Basil Bot available to customers from the website, Facebook, Twitter and, a sector first, WhatsApp.

Basil uses its extensive knowledge base to answer customer’s questions – covering over 100 different topics. Some of the most popular topics include support with reporting a repair, looking up an account balance, reporting lost keys and fobs and making a booking with the Income or Financial Support team or Housing Manager.

Just 12 months after launch, Basil now deals with 50% of all enquiries that we receive, with 77.1% of these resolved by Basil.

We are the first housing association to successfully roll out a chatbot on WhatsApp for Business. WhatsApp is now Basil’s most used channel: 48.2% of the collected data was taken from WhatsApp. Users can opt-in for WhatsApp Notifications, which allows us to update them with information that would previously just have been emailed to them.