Deutsche Annington invests 70 million euros in company reorganisation
Tenant and service centre to further boost customer satisfaction / New flexible external service organisation to provide customers with faster service
Bochum, October 1, 2008 –Deutsche Annington Immobilien Group (DAIG), Bochum, has plans to further raise the level of customer satisfaction. Germany’s largest housing company will invest approximately 70 million euros in the coming months for the purpose of reshaping the company to better meet the needs of the customer.
The core features of the new organisation are a tenant centre, a nationwide hotline for all tenant questions, a service centre for handing standard procedures such as utility charges and a new, powerful external service organisation employing state-of-the-art communication technology that will focus on providing tenants with fast, flexible service. The new organisation will enable Deutsche Annington to break down bureaucratic structures and greatly simplify response procedures. This will make it possible to respond to tenant questions and requests faster and more reliably.
“The new organisation will operate more effectively and at a lower cost. We will be able to offer our customers a high degree of availability and satisfy the vast majority of their requests after their first call,” says Wijnand Donkers, CEO of DAIG. “We are thus blazing new trails in housing management.”
The tenant centre will be reachable Monday through Friday via a nationwide hotline. DAIG tenant centre employees have electronic access to tenant files and are authorised to make fast, effective decisions. They are thus able to answer questions and solve problems in 85 percent of cases following initial contact. When this is not possible, external service providers will make an appointment directly with the customers in order to address their concerns on location.
During the last two years DAIG has had good experiences with a toll-free repair hotline available to customers round the clock, 365 days a year. The objective is to be able to make small repairs within a period of four days.
The reorganisation of the company will in all probability result in the elimination of approximately 400 jobs, circa 150 are located in North Rhine-Westphalia. The company is also considering assigning various tasks to an external service provider. Talks with the works council have already begun. The express goal of company management is to make job cuts as socially compatible as possible. The tenant centre and external service organisation are scheduled for launch in North Rhine Westphalia on April 1st of next year. The remaining German states will be added during the course of 2009.
The acquisition strategy of Deutsche Annington will remain unaffected by the new organisation. “We will continue to pursue out growth objectives and have set aside 1.5 billion euros per year for this purpose for the coming years,” says Donkers. “We are still interested in pursuing consolidation in the long term. We are currently looking at a portfolio comprising a total of approximately 100,000 flats.”
Contact:
Deutsche Annington Immobilien Gruppe
Katja Weisker
Telephone 0049 234 314-1901
Mobile 0049 174 9224995
Dirk T. Schmitt
Telephone 0049 234 314-1175
Mobile 0049 170 3028833
01.10.2008