Sage Homes struggled with fragmented systems, manual processes, and poor data visibility, limiting growth and service quality.
They implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Customer Service, Field Service, and Customer Insights, creating an integrated, automated platform.
Dynamics 365 improved efficiency, reduced costs, enabled a 360-degree customer view, and boosted satisfaction through faster, seamless service.
Sage Homes is a United Kingdom-based affordable housing provider committed to operational efficiency and customer-centric service delivery.
The company had fragmented business applications, manual processes, and insufficient visibility into customers and properties, all of which hindered growth plans. To address these challenges, Sage Homes implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, and Dynamics 365 Field Service across the company. Using the integrated solution, the company increased operational efficiency, gained a 360-degree customer view, improved customer experience, and enhanced marketing and data analysis.
“We recently built a new contact center and we’re expecting to get 10,000 virtual customers overnight. We could not have met that demand without the omnichannel capabilities we have in Dynamics 365 Contact Center.”
Sachin Patel, Head of IT Operations, Sage Homes
Contact center agents save 5–10 minutes per call, totaling 3.5 days per week
As England’s largest provider of newly built affordable housing, Sage Homes is focused on making affordable rent and low-cost ownership available to as many people as possible. With a workforce of 364 employees and a turnover of £371 million in 2024, just seven years from inception, the company is a key player in the public sector housing market.
As Sage Homes grew at scale and pace, it faced operational and technological hurdles. Customer and property data were scattered across disparate spreadsheets, SharePoint folders, and third-party systems, leading to inefficiencies and data inconsistencies. “Each department had its own spreadsheet trackers to manage day-to-day operations. There was no central system with consolidated data, which means we didn’t have easy access to agreements and contracts, and we lacked a full view of our customers,” says Sachin Patel, Head of IT Operations at Sage Homes.
The company’s reliance on manual processes also caused challenges. For example, processing customer property applications and payments was paper-based and required an employee to scan papers and do data entry. Additionally, the company’s customer service representatives had to manually look up customers because the legacy telephony system was not integrated with the Sage Homes CRM system. “When customers would call with questions about repairs, remortgaging, or billing, we had to spend extra time finding and verifying those customers,” Patel says. Data accuracy was another major issue. The Sage Homes marketing team, for instance, dealt with outdated customer contact details, leading to failed communications and survey bounce-backs. “We also weren’t that good at communicating with tenants and surveying them about our repair work,” Patel says.
The organization’s field service representatives, who travel across the country to evaluate properties, also needed efficient and reliable tools to simplify their work. “We have a small internal team of field workers, but we outsourced much of that work, as well as repair work,” says Patel. The company wanted to equip its internal team to manage repairs, as outsourcing increased costs and reduced control over service quality.
Sage Homes knew it needed a new, standardized technological solution to meet its needs. “We realized if we wanted to grow and scale and purchase more properties, we had to move away from manual work,” says Patel.
Sage Homes was already using Microsoft Office 365 internally, and it wanted to build on that by implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 across the business. “Our users had familiarity with Microsoft tools, which we knew would make adoption easier,” says Patel. “We also liked the configurability and customization capabilities of Dynamics 365, which would allow us to tailor the solution to our circumstances while controlling user access.”
Sage Homes implemented a comprehensive suite of Dynamics 365 solutions, beginning with Customer Service and Contact Center, a Microsoft Copilot-driven solution that offers omnichannel capabilities including interactive voice response (IVR), AI agents, conversation summaries, and live transcriptions for customer service representatives.
The company then implemented Field Service, which gives field employees the ability to use a mobile app to evaluate properties and manage property defect repairs, with data visible to managers in the main office.
Sage Homes adopted Customer Insights – Journeys, which gives the company’s marketing team tools to build omnichannel campaigns. The company also created an online customer portal on Dynamics 365, where people can reserve properties and fill out online housing application forms. To improve data analysis, Sage Homes uses Power BI to build reports based on data in the company’s contact center environment.
“Our users had familiarity with Microsoft tools, which we knew would make adoption easier. We also liked the configurability and customization capabilities of Dynamics 365, which would allow us to tailor the solution to our circumstances while controlling user access.”
Sachin Patel, Head of IT Operations, Sage Homes
With Contact Center, Sage Homes contact center representatives have a unified 360-degree view of each customer’s details as soon as a call comes in. The solution’s integrated IVR routing, automated call transcriptions and summaries, and CRM data help improve contact center agent performance. “We recently built a new contact center and we’re expecting to get 10,000 virtual customers overnight. We could not have met that demand without the omnichannel capabilities we have in Dynamics 365 Contact Center,” says Patel. “The whole process is seamless now. When a customer calls, we can find them and verify them immediately because their details are right there in the system, so the contact center agent can begin assisting the customer right away.”
Because the new solution can route and find customers within seconds, contact center representatives can take more calls. They are saving 5-10 minutes per call, for a total time savings of 3.5 days per week. Additionally, customer wait times, which used to average well over 100 seconds in the previous system, are now under 100 seconds. First responders to customer calls can accept most of the incoming queries, with an average of 58% of calls resolved on first contact.
With faster, easier access to customer call details and no more reliance on manual tasks, Sage Homes sales employees can process applications and sales faster and more efficiently. “The streamlined process in Dynamics 365 saves our sales teams 3-5 days of work, which is what it used to take to manually process forms from start to finish,” says Patel. “We can shorten the time between reserving and sales completion.”
Sage Homes field service representatives can now use Field Service to remotely evaluate properties and schedule property repairs as needed. As a result, the company saves money by not having to pay to outsource jobs. “When we tested Field Service with a small group of workers, we noticed it was between 100£ and 120£ cheaper per repair than outsourcing, so we will likely be expanding our use of Field Service,” says Patel.
Field Service also helps Sage Homes plan repairs more effectively, which improves service quality for customers. “Using Field Service, our workers use mobile devices to complete repair orders, which are instantly visible to our office-based schedulers,” says Patel. “That makes planning repairs easier and more coordinated, and it improves customer service because we’re getting repairs faster. We care deeply about our customers, and we’ve seen a big percentage increase in customer satisfaction.”
“Using Field Service, our workers use mobile devices to complete repair orders, which are instantly visible to our office-based schedulers. That makes planning repairs easier and more coordinated, and it improves customer service because we’re getting repairs faster.”
Sachin Patel, Head of IT Operations, Sage Homes
Using Dynamics 365, Sage Homes automated surveys and segmentation to improve marketing and communications initiatives. “Customer Insights – Journeys makes it easier for us to segment and build repeatable sales and marketing tools, which helps us find the right way to directly communicate to our customers, whether it’s through a survey or an email,” Patel says. “We can also more easily track survey responses, which helps us improve customer satisfaction.”
The unified data model in Dynamics 365 also enabled seamless reporting and analytics for Sage Homes, giving the company deeper visibility into contact center operations. “Through our Power BI reports, we can see all the data coming through from Contact Center. We can see each agent’s performance, customer wait times, or when things are good or bad,” says Patel. With these insights, the company can change processes if necessary to better support its customers. “Because conversations are linked to specific cases or incidents, we can find out why people are calling us,” says Patel. “We can then be proactive about those issues, so the customer hopefully doesn’t have to call us again. Or if the reports show excessive wait times or abandoned calls at certain times, then we know we need to be better staffed to address those problems.”
Sage Homes is continuing its digital transformation journey by testing the use of Microsoft Copilot Studio to summarize call transcripts from Contact Center and generate timelines. The company plans to expand its use of Copilot Studio to incorporate chat and voice bots, to enhance customer self-service capabilities for customers asking questions through the Sage Homes website and customer portal. “Customers using the portal will be able to ask the chat bot about a defect or repair, and the bot will be able to either answer the question or forward the customer to an agent for more in-depth information,” says Patel.
Sage Homes is also exploring Copilot-powered agentic automation in Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Finance to potentially unify financial operations. Additionally, the company is evaluating Microsoft Teams Phone and is also testing proactive outbound voice calls via Customer Insights – Journeys. Says Patel, “We’re very excited to see how Dynamics 365 can continue to help us drive efficiency and automation across our business.”
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