Social housing organization de Alliantie Foundation finds efficiency with AI to better serve tenants

To meet the growing demand of affordable homes in the Netherlands, de Alliantie Foundation continually experiments. In addition to building new housing communities, the Dutch social housing organization transforms office buildings into apartments or adds floors to existing homes. In service to their commitment to become carbon-neutral before 2050, it undertakes energy-saving retrofits, builds car-free city districts, pilots natural gas-free homes heated by alternative methods, and more. Recently, de Alliantie incorporated AI into its operations to stay on the cutting edge—and ultimately ensure more people can access affordable, sustainable homes.

“We are known to be an innovative organization,” explains Jannes Hessels, Chief Information Officer of de Alliantie. “By giving us the opportunity to be both secure and up and running consistently, the Microsoft stack helps us pursue that innovation.”  

True to its name, which translates to the Alliance Foundation, de Alliantie has created a sort of coalition between technology and people. The nonprofit recently built and deployed AI solutions into its call center operations, where staff respond to 3,000 calls a week. A generative AI chatbot helps call center staff quickly find the right answer to tenant questions, and a transcription tool works with generative AI to transform recordings into written records and anonymized summaries. 

“We built technical solutions using Azure AI, and they only work because of the human side, which is so important,” says Dany Lopulalan, Workforce Manager of Customer Service at de Alliantie. "Our employees make us a warm organization, so we can keep a roof over our tenants’ heads.”

Empowering employees to better serve tenants

De Alliantie manages more than 58,000 homes—a number that continually rises as the nonprofit grows. Just 35 people staff the de Alliantie customer service center, which fields concerns about repairs, late payments, and more. Staff used to look up answers in the online knowledge base via a clunky search function. When newer members of the team could not find a solution, they would ask the senior staff. 

De Alliantie’s IT, Data, and Digitalization team built a generative AI chatbot to produce consistently accurate answers faster. Built using Azure OpenAI Service, the chatbot digests information from the knowledge base and uses generative AI to yield a response based on the source material. The answers are linked to the original articles so staff can double-check or learn more. Now staff can reply to tenants within seconds.  

The organization runs monthly trainings on using generative AI tools, including improved prompting techniques, to get the best answers. Adoption has been swift. “We invest in trainings because we want our employees to become confident in working with generative AI tools,” says Thomas Westveer, Data Scientist at de Alliantie.

The AI chatbot saves about nine hours every week. The efficiencies create space to improve articles in the knowledge base and write helpful content that addresses a new issue, such as advice on how tenants can apply for governmental energy relief. The saved time enables senior staff to proactively coach more junior employees, leading to better conversations with tenants. 

“Tenants are at the forefront of everything we do. We work as much as we can to help tenants find the correct house, repair their home, and live in a place they feel comfortable and safe,” Hessels says. “We believe that technology, especially AI, can help make this as seamless and simple as possible.”

Developing data-backed strategies 

De Alliantie also uses generative AI to transcribe and summarize calls, then analyze the conversations to identify patterns. Azure AI Speech services transform audio recordings into text. The organization found that the Azure OpenAI Whisper model for Dutch yields the most accurate transcriptions for a variety of accents and dialects. “This AI makes sure every tenant is heard,” Westveer says.

An Azure OpenAI-based solution then produces a two-sentence summary of every call. De Alliantie designed this function to exclude any personal details to protect tenants’ privacy. The anonymized recap covers what the tenant asked and what de Alliantie is doing in response. The solution categorizes each call, many of which fall in a pre-defined set of common topics. If the call does not align to these themes, cluster analysis identifies a new topic. This ability enables the nonprofit to identify emerging issues, such as flooding after a rainy period. 

“Before, we had to rely on gut feelings,” Lopulalan says. Now de Alliantie can run reports to show how many calls they receive on a given topic and how these patterns change over time. 

“With one push of a button, AI gives us complete and up-to-date insights on the issues currently impacting our tenants,” Hessels says. “Then we can optimize a strategy to solve their concerns, in less time.”

The organization keeps audio recordings and transcripts for 30 days in case quality checks are needed, then automatically deletes them to align to their privacy-by-design posture. Microsoft technology gives de Alliantie confidence that other sensitive data is safe. “Our tenants’ privacy is very important to us. Microsoft tooling helps us manage their data and stay secure,” Hessels says. 

De Alliantie continues to explore AI. The nonprofit anticipates experimenting with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilots within Dynamics 365, optimizing data through AI, and more. 

“De Alliantie is always looking for opportunities to optimize our services for tenants, and AI helps us do our business more efficiently,” Hessels says. “Microsoft AI gives us a more detailed look at our tenant base and gives us more opportunity to direct our strategies. That way, we help our tenants now and in the future.”