Engaging affordable housing program participants with web-based portals

Web-based portals that provide a tailored customer experience (CX) for affordable housing (AH) program participants are increasingly important for public housing authorities (PHA). When participants access AH information anywhere, at any time and using any device, they  find it easier to remain compliant with AH program guidelines. As more participants interact with such applications, PHAs experience lower operating expenditure and can focus on the AH mission.

Such AH portals provide participants the latest information, notifications of pending actions, options to process transactions, and the ability to communicate with the PHA using a digital channel. PHAs experience higher operational efficiency, improved citizen services, constituent satisfaction, and march forward towards achieving their sustainability goals.

However, with many technology options available, agencies and organizations often struggle to decide which approach best suits their needs, has the flexibility to scale up to various business areas, and provides the return on investment they desire. We recently deployed a web-based portal using low-code cloud platform technology, which program participants are finding highly useful.

Golden rules for customer engagement

During the deployment, we confirmed some key principles for developing and implementing such a system. They include:

• Identify CX requirements: A simple and intuitive user interface enables customers to focus on business actions and accurately perform their desired tasks without specific training—but how you get to that may vary from one situation to another. Get a detailed understanding of the customers and identify the CX requirements that best fit the particular circumstances. This informs your choices regarding technologies and customizations. 
• Create wireframes: Using a low-code platform does not mean you can wait to define the customer experience until you’re actually developing the application. Creating customer journeys and wireframes during the design phase of any web application is essential. This assures minimal rework during development of the application.
• Utilize advanced forms: Advanced forms offer several features to enhance customer experience, notably orchestrated steps that help create a wizard-based form submission experience to guide users through the process. When configuring advanced forms, we recommend planning steps per wireframes to achieve desired CX. We also recommend thorough evaluation of branching conditions to assure coverage for all business scenarios.
• Create deployment profiles: Create deployment profiles specific to each environment involved in your deployment. This enables quick, error-free deployments that can also be easily automated.

Technology choice and deployment routine

While deploying this portal, we evaluated several technology options including third-party commercial off-the-shelf products, custom web applications and low-code platform technology. We chose a low-code platform because the COTS products couldn’t provide the level of customization needed, and the client wanted an engaging customer experience with a short turn-around and a limited budget. We deployed the portal in two phases—an invitation-only “soft-launch” phase that enabled us to observe user behavior and telemetry while streamlining supporting business operations leading to a “general availability” phase where the application is available to all constituents. During soft launch, we observed that constituents could complete tasks to reach their goal with ease.

We attribute this success to customer experience design and the low-code platform, which enabled us to deliver the customer experience in time and within budget.

To learn more about our CX design, read our new white paper.