Carl Stokes, Head of IT, NHBC (National House-Building Council)

SuperNova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Company

NHBC (National House-Building Council) is the leading warranty and insurance provider and standards setter for UK house-building for new and newly converted homes. As a non-profit distributing company, it reinvests all income in achieving its primary purpose; improving quality in housebuilding to protect homeowners

The Problem

Over recent years, NHBC has been able to maintain a share of the new homes warranty market in excess of 80%. However since the significant downturn in 2008, the UK housing market has become increasingly competitive with a small number of providers competing harder to maintain or build share in this smaller market.In order to protect market share and defend against customer attrition, NHBC recognised that there was an opportunity to further differentiate its offering on value and quality of service rather than competing on price.

The Solution

The Web Transformation Programme was an investment made by NHBC to achieve this, focusing on two primary deliverables – the Home User Guide portal and the Partner portal services.

NHBC is the first organisation to offer these services online which it believes will substantially strengthen its competitive position and ability to defend itself against competitor attack.

A further business driver for the Home User Guide portal specifically, is to create the opportunity to develop a direct online relationship with its warranty customers, allowing NHBC to build its brand further with consumers and in so doing create further ‘pull’ for builders to use the NHBC new home warranties. 

The Results

The Home User Guide (NHBC HUG) provides builders with an easy-to-use administration suite where they can upload information, specifications, images and video clips about the new homes they have built.

Once completed, the builder can be hand over the Home User Guide to the new homeowner, providing them with a single place where they will always be able to access the information about their new home – covering home specifications and materials used, operating manuals for appliances, how to guides about their new home and details of their NHBC warranty.

The solution is being rolled out to the UK’s major builders with each one selecting a number of sites to trial the way they wish to introduce the new online guides to their new homeowners. This will take place during 2013, with a launch of the product to all new homeowners who purchase a new home with a NHBC warranty during the first half of 2014.

The Technology

Oracle WebCenter Content, SOA and ADF hosted on a Fujitsu Private Cloud.

Metrics

Target is to have tens of thousands of active new homeowner users by the end of the next financial year. Essentially this reflects the number of unique web sites created. In addition, there is targeted to be a substantial proportion of NHBC’s registered builders using the service at that time.

Partner portal provides builders with an online system that will allow them to self-service the registration of new sites and plots for NHBC’s new home warranty and other additional services. It allows builders, or their designated partners such as architects or other professions, to securely input and upload the information and to receive a specific quote for the services requested which they can accept online.

Development of this application is in the final stages now and the service will be piloted with a number of major builders first before full rollout to all builder customers scheduled by the end of the calendar year. All of the thousands of existing extranet users will be migrated to the new service during this period.

Disruptive Factor

Customers expect great customer experience and this gives them something no one else offers.

The Partner portal service will more than replace the limited functionality currently provided by NHBC’s existing extranet service for its builder customers and their partners, the latter being a service that  allows builders to upload construction documents for a site that has previously been registered via a paper-based process.

It has essentially gone from being a boring 'lookup' service to being a rich customer experience that gives them one place to build up information about their new home.

Shining Moment

Pride in the go live - youtube launch http://bit.ly/10NIVYH - press and media coverage