Calderbrook Housing Group / BB-Demo – Discovery
Callcompleted
Calderbrook Housing Group: documents · 2024-06-24 14:00
Helen Marsden, Head of Business Intelligence, wants one traceable source for the board pack and tests every claim against it. Tom Ashdown floated the Growth tier at about fifty-six thousand all in. She wants a decision by 16 Aug 2024.
What was said
What this says
Current to 11 Oct 26Helen Marsden, Head of Business Intelligence, wants one traceable source for the board pack and tests every claim against it. Tom Ashdown floated the Growth tier at about fifty-six thousand all in. She wants a decision by 16 Aug 2024.
What happened: Tom ran a discovery call with Helen. She described her team copying figures between the housing system, call recorder, helpdesk and accounting system, and losing most of a week to reconciliation.
Customer view: Helen sees the board pack as the test and wants any figure to click back to its source record. Security of tenant call data and the maintenance burden on a small team are her stated worries.
Commercial: Tom pointed to the Growth tier with implementation included, about fifty-six thousand all in, and said he would confirm it in writing. Helen took it as not a surprise. She wants a decision before the autumn board papers, and Tom noted 16 Aug 2024.
Watch: The Snowflake and call-data security answer sits with Hannah and Calderbrook IT. Helen will not go over her leadership team's heads, so they need to be involved early.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Theme
Board pack reconciliation pain
Importance
neutral
Sentiment
positive
Voice
champion
Who was there
BB-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Tom Ashdown sends demo options and a written outline of the commercial breakdown.
- Hannah sends the sample data request and the Snowflake security answer for IT.
- Helen Marsden sends the board pack sections with the figures that do not reconcile.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- Tenant call recordings are sensitive, and a weak security answer for IT could stop the deal.
- Helen fears the brain becomes another thing her small team has to maintain.
- The decision date depends on getting her analyst and IT into the same room.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- Growth tier with implementation, with a demo on Calderbrook's own board pack data.
- Call recordings that no earlier project covered could become a differentiator.
Transcript
Tom Ashdown NoneHello Helen, can you hear me alright? I'm getting a bit of an echo on my side.
Helen Marsden NoneHello Tom. Yes, I can hear you. I think that's my headset, hang on. Is that better?- Tom Ashdown NoneMuch better. No drama. How's your week looking? It's only Monday, but I know board-pack season can be a bit much.
- Helen Marsden NoneIt's already a bit much, if I'm honest. I've spent the whole morning on one figure in the arrears section of the board pack that doesn't match what finance have. These don't reconcile, and the board will ask. So I'm slightly in that frame of mind, apologies.
- Tom Ashdown NoneDon't apologise, that's exactly why I wanted to get you on. I'd rather hear about that than recite what we do. Is it all right if I ask a few questions and then say a bit about us at the end?
- Helen Marsden NonePlease. I've got a hard stop at about twenty-five to, so that works.
- Tom Ashdown NoneBrilliant. So, set the scene for me. Calderbrook, around twenty-one thousand homes across West Yorkshire, and you lead the business intelligence team. What's the team actually there to produce?
- Helen Marsden NoneIn a sentence, a picture the board can trust. Tenants, repairs, complaints and rent arrears, all in one place, in a pack that goes out every cycle. At the moment it's a lot of people copying figures from one system into another, and then somebody else checking them.
- Tom Ashdown NoneRight. And when you say one place, what's it spread across today? Just talk me through the systems, as many as come to mind.
- Helen Marsden NoneThe housing management system is the spine. That's the record of tenancies, rent accounts and repairs jobs. Then we've got the call recorder in the contact centre, because a huge amount of what tenants tell us never makes it into a case note. Then the helpdesk, where repairs and complaints tickets sit. And finance have their own accounting system, which is where the arrears numbers come from, or are supposed to.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAnd the board pack, where does that get built? Is it spreadsheets, a reporting tool, something else?
- Helen Marsden NoneMostly spreadsheets, if I'm honest, feeding a document in SharePoint. We have some dashboards, but nobody quite believes them, which is the real problem. If I put a repairs completion figure in section four and the repairs team quote a different one in their own report, then the first ten minutes of the board meeting is about which number is right.
- Tom Ashdown NoneMm. Yeah. I've heard that more than once, to be fair. Can you give me an example of a figure that's gone wrong recently?
- Helen Marsden NoneRepairs jobs completed in the quarter. The housing system gives one count, and one of my analysts, who does the repairs reporting day to day, gets a different count from his own extract. They're out by a fair margin. And I can't tell you which is right without somebody going through job by job.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAnd how long does that take, going through job by job?
- Helen Marsden NoneDays. Not continuous days, but it eats most of a week across the team. And it's the same people every time, which is why I'm interested in this at all. My team should be telling the board what's happening, not reconciling.
- Tom Ashdown NoneFair enough. Let me ask a slightly awkward one. Has anyone tried to fix this before? An internal project, a tool, a consultancy?
- Helen Marsden NoneThere was a data warehouse project a while ago. It did what it was meant to do, technically, but it stopped at tables. Nobody outside my team could ask it a question. And it didn't include the call recordings at all, because nobody knew what to do with them.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSo the calls are a bit of a black box.
- Helen Marsden NoneCompletely. We know complaints are said on calls before they're ever logged. We just can't see it in aggregate. Can you show me the source, is what I'd ask of anything. If a figure comes out, I want to click back to the record it came from.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat's a good test, and I'll come back to it, because it's a big part of how we've built the thing. Before that, who else cares about this at Calderbrook? Who'd be in the room if we got further?
- Helen Marsden NoneI'd be the sponsor. My analysts would use it day to day, the repairs one especially. IT would need to be involved because of where it runs, and finance, because of the arrears figures. Beyond that, it would go up through my leadership team. I don't go over people's heads lightly, so I'd want them with me from the start.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSensible. Right, shall I give you the short version of what we are?
- Helen Marsden NoneGo on.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSo, BB-Demo builds what we call the company brain. It connects to the systems you've just listed, the housing system, the call recorder, the helpdesk, the accounting system, and puts one layer over them that you can ask questions of in plain English. And the important bit for IT is that it's built and runs inside your own Snowflake account. Your data doesn't go off to us to live somewhere.
- Helen Marsden NoneThat will matter to our IT people. I don't know off the top of my head what we have in that space, so I'd have to take that back to them.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAbsolutely, leave that with me, and I'll bring in our solutions engineer, Hannah, who does exactly that conversation. She'd be on the demo as well.
- Helen Marsden NoneWhat does answering a question look like? Because I've seen plenty of tools that give you a confident answer with nothing behind it.
- Tom Ashdown NoneYeah, and that's the thing to be wary of. You ask it, say, how many repairs jobs were completed last quarter, and it gives you the answer and shows you which records it used. You can follow it back. That's what I'd want you to test on your own data, not on a demo dataset with nice clean numbers.
- Helen Marsden NoneI'd insist on that. The board pack is the test. If it can't help me with section four and the arrears section, I'm not interested.
- Tom Ashdown NoneFair. So the demo would be built around those two sections. You tell us what you'd like to see and we'll set it up on your data.
- Helen Marsden NoneWhich would need extracts from us. What would you need?
- Tom Ashdown NoneA sample, nothing live. Hannah will tell you exactly what and in what shape, and I'll get her to put it in writing so nobody's guessing. I won't try to be clever about it on this call.
- Helen Marsden NoneGood. And I should ask, because the board will ask me, roughly what are we talking about commercially? I'm not holding you to it.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSure. I won't quote you anything from memory, I'll confirm it in writing, but the shape is our Growth tier, which covers several teams and the dashboards builder, and with the implementation included you'd be looking at something like fifty-six thousand all in. That's the total for the deal, implementation included, not a yearly figure on its own. I'll send you the breakdown properly.
- Helen Marsden NoneRight. That's useful to know. Not nothing, but not a surprise either. What does implementation involve on your side and ours?
- Tom Ashdown NoneConnecting the sources, loading the history, then checking with your team that what comes out matches what you expect. It's a fixed fee and a fixed timeline. The detail again is Hannah's, so I'd rather she gave you the real answer than me waffling.
- Helen Marsden NoneThat's fine. One more thing. I want to be straight about the calls. The recordings contain tenant information, some of it sensitive. How does that get handled?
- Tom Ashdown NoneIt's a proper question, and I won't give you a half answer. It stays in your environment, but the specifics on access controls and what's indexed is a security conversation, and Hannah will go through it with your IT people in detail, in writing. I'd sooner you had the right answer a day late than a quick one from me.
- Helen Marsden NoneThank you. That's the answer I wanted, actually.
- Tom Ashdown NoneGood. So, timing. You mentioned the board cycle. Where do you want to be, and when?
- Helen Marsden NoneI'd like a decision before the autumn board papers start. So if we can see it on our own data in the next few weeks, and have an answer on whether it's worth doing by the middle of the summer, that works.
- Tom Ashdown NoneI've pencilled 16 Aug 2024 in my notes as the point where we'd want a decision, so that's about right. Does that feel sensible to you?
- Helen Marsden NoneTight, but sensible. If the demo goes well I'll want my analyst and IT on it, so the date depends on getting them in a room.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThen let's get something in the diary now rather than later. I'll send a few options for the demo, a couple of weeks out, and I'll ask Hannah to join. Would an afternoon suit you better than a morning?
- Helen Marsden NoneAfternoon, yes. Mornings are board-pack territory.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAfternoon it is. And to recap, so I've got it right: I send you a note after this with the demo options and a rough outline of what we'd cover. Hannah follows with what she'd need from you in terms of sample data. You take the question about Snowflake to your IT colleagues. Anything missing?
- Helen Marsden NoneI'll also send you the outline of sections four and the arrears section, with the figures that don't reconcile, so you've got the actual problem to work from and not my description of it.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat would be ideal. That's the thing I'd most like to see. Is there anything you wanted to ask me that we haven't covered?
- Helen Marsden NoneOnly whether this will end up being another thing my team has to maintain. We're a small team.
- Tom Ashdown NoneHonest answer, there's some ownership on your side, someone who administers it day to day, and we'd work out with you who that is. But the point is it should take work away, not add it. If it doesn't, you should tell us, and I mean that.
- Helen Marsden NoneFair enough. I'll hold you to that.
- Tom Ashdown NonePlease do. Right, I'll let you get back to that arrears figure. Thanks for your time, Helen, really useful.
- Helen Marsden NoneThank you, Tom. I'll send the outline this afternoon. Speak soon.
- Tom Ashdown NoneCheers, Helen. Bye for now.
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