When it comes to digital innovation in social housing, Salford-headquartered Voicescape is quietly leading the way.
Over the past five years, the social housing software specialist has grown from a 15-person team to 70 staff, secured £9m investment from growth capital investor BGF to fuel its growth plans, and has just completed its second acquisition with Manchester-based tech firm Enterprise RPA.
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The deal creates what the company describes as the UK’s ‘first’ integrated AI-driven tenant engagement and robotic process automation platform built specifically to support social landlords and local authorities.
But for managing director Gary Haynes, he tells me the company’s growth story isn’t just about tech. It’s about people…
“We want to take away unnecessary workloads”
Voicescape already works with nearly 100 social housing landlords and local authorities across the UK, helping those providers to manage everything from rent arrears and gas safety checks to damp and mould cases and daily welfare check-ins for vulnerable tenants.
Its AI tools analyse landlord–tenant interactions and make “risk-based” recommendations on who to contact, when, and through which channel to achieve the best outcome.
“A lot of people work in social housing because they have a social conscience,” Haynes tells Prolific North. “They go to work every day hoping they can help somebody. But caseloads are forever going up, the cost of living and energy crisis has had an impact, and teams are often overworked.
“We want our software to improve contact with tenants so they get a better experience, so they don’t have to sit in a call centre queue for 15 minutes. At the same time, we’re helping teams inside those organisations work more efficiently and focus on the cases that genuinely need more human contact.”
And while AI and automation has its sceptics, he made it clear Voicescape’s solutions are designed to support people, rather than take away jobs.
“We’re very vocal about the fact that we don’t develop software to try and put people out of work,” he explains. “What we’re trying to do is take away unnecessary workloads created by inefficient systems, so staff have more time for meaningful human contact. If we can help overworked teams and improve outcomes for tenants at the same time, that’s where the real value is.”
The growth turning point
Founded in 1998, Voicescape’s rapid scaling story is much more recent. The arrival of a new management team coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, and while it was a challenging period for most businesses, it became a catalyst for change for Voicescape.
“While Covid was horrible for everyone, it showed that if you engage and communicate with tenants more effectively, especially vulnerable residents, you can get better results. It really highlighted the importance of digital engagement,” he explains.
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That realisation accelerated the company’s product research and development, including the launch of the company’s Caseload Manager platform, designed to prioritise officer workloads to reduce case volumes by as much as 90% in comparison with traditional housing systems.
Voicescape also made its first acquisition with Message Dynamics, a Buckinghamshire-based provider of patient messaging services in 2021, and later in 2023, secured a £9m investment from BGF.
As for revenue, he claims it is on the verge of increasing “tenfold”, and the team has grown from 15 to 70 in just over five years. But he insists scaling hasn’t just been about headcount.
“We hire about half on capability and half on whether Voicescape is the right place for them to join,” he explains. “We’ve hired dozens of people, but we’re very focused on keeping that ‘magic thing’ that makes us different and a genuinely good place to work.”
And that cultural focus played directly into Voicescape’s second acquisition.
When ‘two plus two equals five’
The company’s recent acquisition of Manchester-based Enterprise RPA, which supports social housing providers to deliver better tenant support through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), stemmed from an existing partnership. Both companies shared customers, including Onward Homes, and “regularly crossed paths”.
“People who bought their automation solutions were often the same people who bought our solutions, and although they did two different things, they were adjacent to each other,” he explained.
“We started talking about a partnership and that quite rapidly developed into a bigger opportunity. We have an internal saying when it comes to looking at partnerships — can we make two plus two equal five?
“If bringing their software together with ours creates something stronger than the individual parts, that’s real added value for customers. That’s where the deal stemmed from.”
The deal brings Enterprise RPA’s 13 staff into the fold, with existing customer contracts, pricing and support arrangements remaining unchanged. More importantly, he explains it was a cultural fit.
“One of the things we spotted very early on, because they do a similar thing but through different tech, is that it was a real meeting of minds in terms of the culture of the business.
“It felt like they were already part of the family. They share a similar belief that technology should make a positive difference to our customers.”
Being part of a larger, scaled organisation now gives the Enterprise RPA team access to Voicescape’s marketing, sales, and support infrastructure — and the chance to learn from the “growth struggles” Voicescape navigated over the past five years.
Northern roots, national reach and looking ahead
Last year, Voicescape moved into Exchange Quay from Boat Shed, which saw the tech firm double its office footprint and Haynes credits the North West for its growth.
“Being based in Manchester has been really positive. There’s great access to talent and skills, strong local universities and lots of social landlords nearby that we can partner with.”
While serving clients from London to Scotland, he admits that Northern transport links can be frustrating but being based in the North has made scaling more “sustainable” than it would have been in London.
“I think if we tried to do the same thing in the city of London, then that would have been a much bigger challenge,” he explains. “Being Northern is in our DNA. That, as well as good access to talent through local universities, has helped make our growth less painful than if we were working in an area without that access to talent.”
As for what’s next, with nearly 100 customers and the integration of Enterprise RPA underway, the obvious question is whether further acquisitions are on the cards.
“It’s certainly something we’re open to. We do a lot of product-led innovation ourselves and have an internal development team to help bring our ideas to life – but potentially we can see someone else in the ecosystem trying to achieve the same things we want to do,” he explains.
“We are an ambitious business, we want to keep innovating more software that makes even more difference. There’s really no end to our ambition – there are so many problems in the sectors we operate in, and there’s no shortage of tech that can help improve lives and free up even more time for better human contact.”
