Income Accounts Advisor

Job title: Income Accounts Advisor

Service Area: Customer and Communities

Team: Neighbourhoods - Income Services

Hours: 36.25 hours

Job Overview:

To provide a joined-up customer focused income service to all customers whilst supporting tenancy sustainment
To maximise income collection, ensuring performance indicators and service standards are met and maintained

Key Areas of Work:

To deliver high performance income collection that contributes to Income Services key performance indicators.
Make outbound calls relating to customers with chargeable arrears, Former Tenant arrears, garage arrears, low-level debt, returned direct debits and any other debts owed to our client.
To collect and pursue sundry charges including garage rent, former tenants' arrears, chargeable repairs, court costs, ground rent, garage plots and garden tenancies, service charges and shop rent.
To liaise with tenants, former tenants, and other debtors to arrange payments, agree sustainable payment plans based on income and expenditure and individualised money management agreements to maximise income collection
To complete Rent Verifications for UC and handle and act on all notifications to our client by the DWP.
Maintain, input and extract information from the Housing management systems, CRM, and financial inclusion databases.
To support the Income Officers, Rent Accounting Team, Homeownership Team as and when required.
To challenge service delivery methods, suggest and assist in the implementation of improvements to ensure customer expectations, VFM and performance indicators are met.
Raise awareness of financial inclusion initiatives, welfare benefits signposting and making referrals to colleagues, other teams, professional partners, and agencies.
To contribute and be involved in awareness raising and collection campaigns and projects.

Technical Competencies:

Excellent customer focus and experience of providing customer focussed service in an arrear's recovery or similar role.
Ability to translate customer needs into service delivery and to gather, interpret and relay information from them.
Negotiation and advisory skills to assist customers to seek resolutions to their financial difficulties.
Be performance focussed and comply with company targets and deadlines.
Microsoft Office skills, with the ability to produce documents to a professional and accurate standard.
Ability to make effective decisions and deal with challenging situations effectively.
Working knowledge of housing and welfare benefits, legal proceedings relating to arrears recovery and all relevant housing legislation.
Understand Welfare Reform and the impact this can have on customers, specifically Universal Credit.
Understand the pressures of financial difficulties, challenging behaviour and mental health.
Able to resolve customer enquiries promptly by adapting to the individual customer needs.
Positively embraces change and is adaptable to the ever-changing social housing sector.
Able to work flexibly and be adaptable in approach.
Numerical skills.
Data base skills.

Organisational Competencies:

Customer focus - has the commitment to putting customers first and ability to deliver a consistently high-quality service
Communicating and influencing - the ability to communicate spoken and written information clearly and effectively in a variety of formats with a diverse range of people. Takes account of their views and uses influence where necessary for a productive outcome
Working efficiently and effectively - ensures own targets are met and business wide targets are supported. Delivering quality services which offer value for money within agreed timeframes. Being creative and practical in developing new ways of working to improve services for customers and partners
Team working - Uses interpersonal skills to work co-operatively with colleagues, internal and external partners, working pro-actively across cultures and organisational boundaries, sharing information, new knowledge, innovation and ideas
Embracing change - the ability to plan for, adapt to and work with a variety of situations, individuals and groups. Has a positive attitude to change and the ability to identify opportunities to improve performance
Respect - the recognition and valuing of difference in the broadest sense, contributing to a working culture and practices that recognise, respect, value and harness diversity for the benefit of the organisation and all individuals
Commitment to the organisation - the ability to demonstrate understanding of and commitment to the organisation and the services it provides for our communities. Working with consistency, integrity, accountability and demonstrating this by always being positive and professional

Personal Competencies:

Awareness and empathy of the social issues that may impact upon customers.
Works in adherence with organisational objectives.
Works to develop a one team culture, improving collaborative working and excellent results.
Actively practices and encourages in others; respect, and values diversity for the benefit of the organisation.
Demonstrates a commitment to the society and the services it provides for communities.
Commits to putting customers first and ability to deliver a consistently high-quality service.
Works consistency, integrity, accountability and professionalism at all times.
An ability to effectively and efficiently manage workloads and meet deadlines and targets through use of flexible working arrangements.
Ability to listen and communicate effectively with all customers, customers and colleagues
Ability to identify risks and be able to react to these quickly and appropriately
An ability to input, manipulate, diagnose, and analyse information on computer systems.
Ability to act on initiative, assess situations and make appropriate decisions.
Ability to maintain confidentiality and understands data protection.

Qualifications:

GCSE C grade or above in Maths, or equivalentBarker Ross Group values diversity and promotes equality. No terminology in this advert is intended to discriminate against any of the protected characteristics that fall under the Equality Act 2010. We encourage and welcome applications from all sections of society and are more than happy to discuss reasonable adjustments and/or additional arrangements as required to support your application.

For the purposes of the Conduct Regulations 2003, when advertising permanent vacancies we are acting as an Employment Agency, and when advertising temporary/contract vacancies we are acting as an Employment Business