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A week in the life of… an income advisor

Farrah Lea is an income advisor at Cross Keys Homes. She spends the week supporting tenants and negotiating payment plans

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During the week Farrah received training for live chat, so now she can help customers through the instant messaging service
During the week Farrah received training for live chat, so now she can help customers through the instant messaging service
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Farrah Lea, an income advisor at Cross Keys Homes, spends the week supporting tenants and negotiating payment plans #UKhousing

Monday

I start by contacting customer after customer by phone, text and email to talk about their accounts and offer support.

Later, I check in with my colleague Megan – she is actually a neighbourhood manager but has temporarily transferred to our team during the pandemic to help out. I helped with her training and she’s done an amazing job of picking everything up, but we still catch up once a week to make sure everything’s alright.

Tuesday

At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Cross Keys Homes set up a welfare fund specifically to support individuals who were struggling with the impact – we call it the ‘Be Kind’ fund. This afternoon, I make a referral to the fund after talking to a customer who has been cooking with nothing but a microwave for months. She was in tears when I explained we would buy her a cooker.

I’ve had a lot of calls like that since April, and every time it’s amazing to be able to help out with often quite simple requests that make a world of difference to people’s lives. When we take away the things that are causing people added stress, they feel like they can get back to their day to day. I love that I get to make being kind part of my every day now!


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Wednesday

Tomorrow, two members of the team will be heading into the office to print out our notices of seeking possession, so I need to make sure all my cases are up to date. While we’re honouring the commitment not to evict anyone due to the pandemic, this is a really important step in our escalation process to make sure people understand how essential it is to contact us about any problems they are having with paying their rent.

I have some really positive conversations with a couple of tenants who I’ve been working with over the past few months. They were at the point of being evicted when lockdown began, but through our talks they’ve seen the benefit of making the most of this time to get their finances under control and have since been making payments to bring their arrears down.

Arrears were understandably a big concern when lockdown began. While we did see an increase at the beginning of April, we now have fewer people in arrears than at the end of March as we’re working hard to contact every tenant and put suitable support in place.

Thursday

Today is the highlight of the work social calendar – we have our team meeting via video call. While we all talk to each other regularly about cases, it’s great to be able to see everyone’s face and ‘get together’ virtually. The team have been a fantastic support network throughout all of this.

The meeting is followed by a training session on how to support customers via live chat. It’s basically an instant messenger service available on our website, so now I can support people who have questions about their rent accounts or are worried about their finances digitally, too.

Friday

While the working week comes to an end for the majority of the team, I’m getting ready for my first Saturday morning shift. We decided to extend our opening hours to include evenings twice a week and every Saturday morning to make it easier for people to get in touch at a time that works for them. It’s just a trial at the moment, so I’m looking forward to seeing how many people get in touch for support.

Even though my week isn’t quite over, today ends on a fantastic note, as a compliment a customer shared about me made it into the daily all-employee email from our chief executive. It makes me so proud to hear about the difference my support can make and it was amazing to be recognised.

Do you know an outstanding professional who deserves to be featured? Email jess.mccabe@insidehousing.co.uk with your suggestions

A week in the life series

A week in the life series

Our ‘A week in the life’ series features housing professionals talking through what they do in their job on a day-to-day basis.

Find out about the different challenges housing workers in a variety of roles face in a given week. 

We aim to feature staff from housing associations, ALMOs, local authorities and more.

Click here to nominate yourself or a colleague for inclusion

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