How an advice charity modernised its national service through coaching and cross-site learning teams
A respected charity. Four sites. Thirty staff coached. A new way of working — together.
The Challenge
This advice charity is Ireland's oldest housing charity — over fifty years old and the first organisation in Ireland to offer a telephone advisory service of its kind. But after decades of organic growth across four major sites, the operation needed to modernise.
The charity attended a CCMA event focused on social housing where Ennovate presented work done with a BPO partner and with housing associations in Scotland. They approached Ennovate afterwards and asked for an initial review of their operations.
What the review found was a complex multi-site operation with inconsistent service levels on the frontline and significant operational variation across sites. Each location had developed its own culture — staff held different beliefs about what their roles were and what they would do for the people they served. Functions like handling inbound requests, case management, and representation work with the Residential Tenancies Board all varied from site to site. There was no centralised inbound line — each site operated independently.
The Approach
The first step was structural: creating a national inbound line with a shared number and putting processes in place to manage it consistently. But structural change alone doesn't change behaviour. That required coaching.
Ennovate created learning teams and one-to-one coaching sessions for approximately thirty staff. Crucially, the learning teams were deliberately mixed across geographic sites rather than kept site-based. This was a conscious design decision — building new relationships and loyalties not grounded in geography, but in shared purpose and shared practice.
These cross-site learning teams ran for about six months, long enough to build the relationships needed to sustain a genuinely national operation. During this period, Ennovate also helped the charity transition to a new senior management team and define new roles: dedicated helpline roles, case management roles, outreach roles for face-to-face work, and specific roles to support representation at the RTB.
Áine Murphy, the lead Ennovate coach on this engagement, has been particularly effective in this environment — working with staff who are deeply committed to their mission but navigating significant change in how that mission is delivered.
Feed Forward Interviewing
One of the distinctive challenges at the charity was that coaching needed to extend beyond recorded-call environments. Outreach work and case management happen face-to-face or in unstructured settings where there are no call recordings to work from.
To address this, Ennovate developed a structured approach called Feed Forward Interviewing, adopted from research. The process works like this: the individual identifies a standout moment — a situation where what they did was particularly successful. That moment is then used as the basis for structured questions to uncover what made it work. The insights feed directly into the learning team sheet or GROW sheet and become the basis for takeaway experiments.
This is significant because it extends the coaching methodology into any work context, not just environments where calls are recorded. For organisations like the charity, where much of the most impactful work happens in person, Feed Forward Interviewing opens the door to the same structured reflection and continuous improvement that call-based coaching provides.
The Results
Service levels improved dramatically. Out-of-hours service was properly staffed. With the frontline running more consistently, more time was freed for case management and casework — the higher-value work that makes the biggest difference in people's housing situations.
Ennovate also supported the charity through a technology transition to Amazon Connect, with AI-powered call transcription and agent summaries. The learning teams provided a safe space for staff to talk through what it meant to move from familiar ways of working to a more technically-supported environment — a transition that can feel threatening without the right support.
Coaching beyond the call centre
Whether your team works on the phone, face-to-face, or across multiple sites, our coaching methodology adapts. If you're looking for structured improvement that respects your people and your mission — let's talk.
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