The Housing and Urban Development Company (Companhia de Desenvolvimento Habitacional e Urbano, CDHU) of the state of São Paulo, an agency whose main mission is to eradicate the housing deficit, has chosen Microsoft’s cloud technologies to centralize its entire CRM process, and develop a robust customer service channel that enables it to monitor calls, manage financial processes, and serve the population effectively.
Linked to the Housing Secretariat of the state government, the CDHU used to have decentralized systems, which didn’t work all that effectively. For the sake of improving the monitoring of open calls, avoiding reworking, reducing paper usage, unifying data, and standardizing the service, and offering better quality and agility to the population, the company adopted cloud technologies.
Thus, the transformation’s first step transformation was the deployment of Dynamics 365 as the company’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Adopting the solution –a set of business cloud applications– made it possible to centralize processes and data, which brought agility to the service’s operations as a whole, and the incorporation of a call center, which became the main contact channel with the population. In the same period, CDHU also acquired Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence tool, to promote better service management throughout the different areas.
The integrations of the solution with internal systems were developed in parallel, aggregating more information to improve the service to the population, in addition to speeding up the issuing of contracts. «Based on this integration, we were able to consolidate all the information and enable several areas to access the same database. This brought agility to the contract issuing process, as well as to data monitoring and information extraction,» said Jaime Mesquita, Superintendent of Systems and Information at CDHU. In addition to customer service and internal processes, the platform was essential for other kinds of work, such as the financing of housing units for the low-income population. Before the solution, the registration of interested parties was done, in person, through a slow process. To optimize this procedure, it has been incorporated into the CRM. «Now, the interested party can simply install an app on their cell phone and fill out a simple form, whose information is stored in the system under a protocol. This streamlined the registration process and reduced the OPEX for CDHU,» Jaime explained.
In addition, a chat service has been set up so that citizens can be serviced remotely. The agency also deployed Power Apps, an application development platform, to develop an application that would aid the teams working on the field, by conducting diagnoses of housing units in irregular locations, helping identify the needs of the communities, and creating housing projects. It’s currently done by processing the information in real-time and synchronizing it with the CRM, this process used to be done on paper and then transferred to a spreadsheet. Finally, Microsoft Teams is being used to provide mobility to its employees; Sharepoint as an intranet service; and Outlook as corporate e-mail.
Ever since the solutions’ deployment, the platform registered more than 2.92 million events, involving 399,000 contracts, 37,856 new housing units, and 180 thousand new registered citizens.
«The CDHU does an extremely relevant job for our society, and it’s gratifying for us to be able to empower them in delivering an even more agile and analytical service to the population, all through the adoption of technology,» said Alessandra Karine, vice president for public, education and health sector, and D&I leader at Microsoft Brazil.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The company has been in Brazil for 32 years and is one of the 120 subsidiaries of the Microsoft Corporation, founded in 1975. In 2020, the company invested over USD 13 million, bringing technology –free of charge– to 1,765 NGOs in Brazil, benefiting several social projects. Since 2011, Microsoft has supported over 7,500 startups in Brazil through donations of over USD 202 million in cloud credits.
