Moat is a housing association based in the South East of England. They partnered with ORM in summer 2017 as the business underwent its digital transformation. With the need for a full re-design of the online digital experience, we started with the existing corporate website and customer portal.

The Challenge

Moat’s mission is “to deliver a best in class digital experience – empowering our customers to self-serve at any time of day or night, and making it easy for partners and prospects to interact with us and stay informed”. The company aimed to focus on innovation and efficiency and be easy to do business with. Moat wanted to create a consistent customer experience that ultimately attracted new tenants and homebuyers to its homes in the South East.

The Solution

The initial stage of the project was to define Moat’s long-term online digital vision and business goals they wanted to achieve. Collaborating with the Moat team through workshops and stakeholder sessions, we plotted the key needs and pain points of different customer types at every stage in their journey, all the way from looking for a home, through to moving in and beyond. This gave us a clear set of user requirements both for the website and for My Moat, the customer portal area which sits behind a login.

From this, a solution design and website component list was created for both the corporate website and customer portal. We also helped Moat adapt the branding and visual identity for digital, ensuring consistency with their offline assets.

From the outset of the project, we looked at ways to deliver the best value to Moat: from combining stakeholder meetings in the discovery phase, to deciding that delivering UX and design across both the corporate website and customer portal would be most beneficial to the project. Also important was defining a long term technical architecture that is able to deliver against current and future business needs, like GDPR and security requirements.

The ORM team also acted as technical consultants on the project, supporting Moat’s product licensing agreements, providing business analysis, and liaising with and providing training and support for third party solution providers such as Sitecore and Rackspace.

ORM and Moat worked in complete collaboration throughout the process, with our strategy, design and technical consultants working closely with Moat’s in-house web developers. Working in partnership with Moat meant we could upskill their in-house teams in content management and new technology platforms. This enabled their developers to build their customer portal, My Moat, allowing them to be self-sufficient. This close relationship meant the combined teams were all engaged and decision making from key stakeholders happened quickly to maintain momentum and broad business buy-in.

The Impact

After a soft launch, www.moat.co.uk and the My Moat customer portal went live on 23rd May 2018. It’s early days, yet there’s already been an increase in digital channel shift, customer engagement and mobile usage across the two platforms. 

The increase in visits and engagement is a positive response to a much simplified IA and improved content. The new website offers users clear paths to the information that’s relevant to them, with navigation titles such as ‘I’m looking for a home’ or ‘I’m a customer’, which allows visitors to find the content they’re looking for quickly and easily.  

Moreover, the customer portal is driving efficiencies, with the number of customer log-ins up by 64% and self-service transactions on the increase. In June last year, only 12 repairs were raised via My Moat, as opposed to 130 in June 2018, which is a great result and a trend that seems to be increasing month on month.