Since launching in 2016, Howsy have disrupted the rental industry with their brand-new landlord experience. By combining smart technology with expert industry know-how, they help landlords find renters, fix repairs in record time and stay ahead of regulation, all on one dashboard. They’re now a workforce of over 100 employees, and are distributed globally, so keeping teams up to date with what’s going on in the business and on top of product changes is a huge priority.
The property industry is extremely fast paced so ensuring their busy employees are informed and compliant is a huge priority for Howsy. They needed to find a system that would keep employees informed about business updates, whilst also training them on how to use recently released product features or adhere to the latest legislation. Howsy’s Head of L&D, Nick Taylor says,
“Before Looop we were sending out emails with training resources that weren’t getting much engagement. Time is a massive issue for our busy teams and the focus is on customer communication channels vs internal emails. We were sharing product updates via email which were getting missed. This was also an issue because we couldn’t track who was opening our emails or clicking through to the training, so we didn’t know who to chase.”
Howsy needed to find a platform that would be engaging, easy to access and could track progress.
Nick chose Looop as the platform allowed them to create user guides, resources and industry specific compliance courses, whilst also allowing them to send out comms to keep in touch with their employees. He says,
“We use Looop to create product newsletters to showcase what is happening in the company. With the campaigns tool, we can create targeted banners on specific teams homepages, I can link them to resources containing updates or user guides and even learning pathways to share relevant, up-to-date information. We’re also able to target employees through different channels, such as emails and slack messages, and the strong branding element allows us to ensure those channels all have the same look and feel. Creating multiple campaigns is easy since we can duplicate existing campaigns. This saves us a lot of time because the campaign assets stay the same. For example, banner images can be used on email notifications time after time; we don’t need to re-upload them each time.
We now use fortnightly sprints to keep employees informed. One side informs the whole business on how to use the system and the second trains the Ops teams on our features.”
This approach didn’t come into practice without some experimentation. Nick says,
“We used a trial-and-error approach to determine what worked best. Initially, we were sharing resources as and when they came out, and the response we had was that there was too much traffic coming from the platform at the wrong time for operations. We used this feedback to minimise the comms we were sending out and decided to offer a bi-weekly campaign to group comms and training updates wherever possible. Looop’s in-app analytics allows us to target different teams at their quieter hours, enabling them time to get up-to-speed.”
As well as keeping their employees up to date with their product updates and internal comms, Howsy are also using Looop for their compliance training.
Nick says,
“We love using a marketing approach for compliance and have automated the process to create initial shares and nudges, send out line manager notifications and can even decide which email addresses the notifications come from. I would never have had this flexibility with LMS tools I have used in the past where distributing the materials and the reporting was largely manual. I now have a compliance series set up, a chaser campaign and then a feedback campaign using the user insights feature. This has made it much easier for managers to track their teams and for the L&D function to get feedback on the quality of courses. This has had a massive impact on reducing the manual workload for both line managers and the L&D team allowing us to focus on other things.”
Being able to track completion and view open rates and click rates has allowed Nick to understand what’s working and what’s not. He says,
“Being able to track completion is great. Before Looop, we were just using email for comms and found these would get lost and there was no way to check if someone had clicked the link. Whereas Looop lets you send stuff out, check if users have completed the training and follow up if not.
User insights allow us to gather feedback quickly and easily. I check this feedback weekly and any comments on resources go straight to my inbox so I can follow up with employees directly on Slack.”
Nick has seen customer complaint rates steadily decrease over the past 6 months, and Howsy’s customer satisfaction score on Trustpilot has gone up due to staff being more knowledgeable. Nick explains,
“Resource feedback allows our employees to share which resources provide value vs which aren’t relevant. This allows us to easily get rid of resources that are ‘dead weight’ and clean up content that offers little to no value based on feedback. We’re also able to look at the route course of complaints in real time and reskill or refresh staff based on the knowledge gaps.
Our employees like that the resources are short and available just in time. They don’t need to remember the content; they know they can access it when they need it.”
Nick says he can’t imagine being in an organisation without a tool like Looop:
“Looop isn’t just an LMS, it’s a lot more. It’s our internal comms tool, our survey tool, our intranet and has allowed us to move from a course to a resource based L&D approach. I love the flexibility it provides; it’s self-directed learning when you need it.”
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