Woonzorg Nederland is a national housing corporation that focuses on providing suitable living spaces for the elderly and individuals with care needs in 170 municipalities. Nowadays, both employees of Woonzorg Nederland and tenants must perform many important digital tasks, and the organization aims to support them as effectively as possible. SelfGuide provides the solution in order to do this.
Woonzorg Nederland is a national housing corporation that focuses on providing suitable living spaces for the elderly and individuals with care needs in 170 municipalities. With nearly 500 employees, the organization not only offers housing but also assists its tenants in living independently. Woonzorg Nederland believes that enhancing the living happiness of tenants is more effective when employees themselves experience happiness in their work, making support a top priority.
To support employees and tenants as effectively as possible in using digital processes, Woonzorg Nederland aims to provide the most efficient assistance. This means that employees, partners, and tenants can always consult the support department with questions and issues. For many years, the support department has referred to PDF documents with instructions, which can also be accessed without the intervention of the support team. Additionally, various 'scrum teams' created instructions for software applications, portals, and digital tasks under their responsibility. Despite recognizing the value of these instructions, the PDF documents no longer fully met the needs. Product Owner for Business Innovations Sander de Vries explains:
“SelfGuide bood Woonzorg Nederland de mogelijkheid om verschillende digitale processen en handelingen vast te leggen in gebruiksvriendelijke instructies. De snelheid en het gemak waarmee deze instructies gemaakt kunnen worden was voor de organisatie de grootste reden om aan de slag te gaan met SelfGuide."
The use of instructions in PDF documents proved to be increasingly inefficient. It became clearer that users struggled to find the correct instruction and that many of them were no longer up to date. Internally, instructions were stored on SharePoint, scattered across various team pages, which often led to confusion. As a result, Woonzorg Nederland sought a solution to easily create, update, and share instructions.
During their search for a solution, Woonzorg Nederland came across SelfGuide, which quickly became regarded as a comprehensive and user-friendly tool for creating instructions. The solution needed to ensure that creating an instruction would be faster and easier, allowing both support department staff and functional managers to spend less time on making and updating instructions. According to Sander de Vries, SelfGuide is particularly well-suited for this purpose:
"Creating an instruction with SelfGuide is very simple. You just turn on the recorder, perform an action, and everything is automatically captured in various steps. Then, you can enrich the screenshots of the different steps with additional information.”
SelfGuide provided Woonzorg Nederland with the ability to document various digital processes and actions in user-friendly instructions. The speed and ease with which these instructions can be created was the organization's primary reason for starting to work with SelfGuide.
After the final choice for SelfGuide, a consultant provided training to various teams within Woonzorg Nederland focused on creating and updating instructions. Additionally, the designated administrators received training on user management and configuration choices. Little time was needed to learn how to work with the tool. According to functional manager Pieter, who is responsible for SelfGuide within Woonzorg Nederland, the use of SelfGuide is straightforward:
“For me, the user management of SelfGuide is very straightforward. I only need to perform minimal actions. If I do have questions, I can quickly reach out to the SelfGuide consultant. When creating instructions, I hardly ever need to assist colleagues, and I receive very few questions about it. At Woonzorg Nederland, we find SelfGuide to be very user-friendly.”
After the implementation of SelfGuide, various teams within Woonzorg Nederland quickly started creating instructions for employees, partners, and tenants. For example, instructions were soon developed for the customer portal 'Mijn Woonzorg', where business tenants have access to repair requests and maintenance allocations.
In addition to the essential requirement for Woonzorg Nederland that creating and updating instructions would take less time, the organization also considered it very important that the instructions are of high quality and easily accessible for users such as their own employees, partners, and tenants. SelfGuide meets these expectations, according to Sander de Vries:
“Users seem to find the instructions clear and user-friendly. You can see that, through the instructions, first-line support questions from users are resolved before they even reach out for contact.”
Woonzorg Nederland has ensured that the instructions in SelfGuide are now available in various locations, making them easy to find for different users. Pieter explains:
“In addition to being accessible directly through SelfGuide, we also place them in the Mijn Woonzorg portal, our intranet, and our Self-Service Portal. The instructions are easily accessible through various channels.”
Despite the presence of SelfGuide within Woonzorg Nederland and the many instructions already benefiting employees and tenants, there are still numerous instructions in PDF format in use. According to Pieter, agreements have been made regarding this::
“When new instructions are needed, for example for new software applications or processes within our portals, we create them using SelfGuide. Additionally, we replace our PDF instructions with SelfGuide instructions when they are no longer current.”
In this way, the number of SelfGuide instructions within Woonzorg Nederland continues to grow. Additionally, the organization has ambitions to focus even more on the users of instructions in SelfGuide in the near future. Gathering feedback and analyzing the use of the instructions should lead to even better support for employees and tenants regarding the use of software applications and portals.
