Sovereign Housing, one of the largest housing associations in the UK, has taken a major step forward on its digital transformation journey with the launch of two new scalable platforms.
As Sovereign’s strategic digital business partner, MMT Digital has been working with the housing association for a number of years. We've been working on an ambitious programme of work to transform it into a modern, connected organisation with customer experience at its heart.
A key component of these digital transformation effort was the launch of a new, self-service customer portal, My Sovereign. In 2018 which gave residents the freedom to pay rent, book repairs, check their rent account and manage appointments from any device for the first time.
My Sovereign now boasts over 24,000 active users, managing over 800,000 form submissions and payment transactions since its inception. It also maintains high levels of site performance and a reduction in operational overheads.
Following the success of the customer portal, it became clear that there was an opportunity to drive greater transformation across the entire digital experience. With that in mind, Sovereign looked to MMT for support in defining their future state architecture and a digital transformation strategy to iterate towards it within the constraints of their legacy platforms.
MMT and Sovereign worked in partnership to review the needs of the business, its customers and stakeholders. After weighing up the assessment criteria and evaluating the technical options available, we concluded that a headless Content Management System (Kentico Kontent) was the best solution to futureproof the Sovereign web estate.
We have now successfully launched the Sovereign corporate site, along with Sovereign Sales, a platform that enables customers to search for properties to rent or buy, using the cloud-first CMS, Kentico Kontent.
The existing platform was a traditional monolithic CMS that was restricting Sovereign’s ability to be flexible to customer needs.
Using Kentico Kontent for managing content, we have given Sovereign a scalable and flexible architecture that allows them to source the ‘best of need’ platforms for the likes of personalisation, segmentation and omni-channel communications in order to deliver the best possible experience for their customers.
Transitioning to a cloud platform marks an important first step in Sovereign’s strategy towards their future state architectural vision. Already, they are benefitting from lower operational costs and faster speed to market which means they can deliver more value and better experiences to their customers.
Both sites launched in September 2020, so our proven agile processes and governance combined with a strong agency/client partnership enabled us to achieve success while working as distributed teams during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Damian Bos, Client Services Director, MMT Digital, comments:
We’re extremely proud of our partnership with Sovereign and the work we’ve delivered this year for them. From an infrastructure perspective, Sovereign are now a market leader with a platform that will future proof their digital capability. Their trust in our recommendations and ability to deliver has allowed us to build a solution which exceeds their customers’ expectations. We look forward to supporting them on the next phase of their transformation, continuing the transition to a cloud-first approach in order to benefit from the new, scalable architecture we have created.
Damian Bos
Client Services Director, MMT
Working with MMT Digital is a true partnership. They’re incredibly supportive in their approach, have provided excellent strategic and technical advice and never lose sight of the needs of our customers. The solutions and sites they’ve developed are already delivering significant benefits and will now allow us to take full advantage of future digital technologies.
Sam Dart
Product Director, Sovereign Housing
If you are facing challenges with scaling up and speed to market, a cloud-first, headless CMS is worth considering. To find out if it could be the right approach for your business, our Headless Assessment is a great place to start, or if you’d like a chat, drop us an email to hello@mmtdigital.co.uk.
