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Mapping Success With Customers

This Wednesday, Emily-Rae Maxwell, Strategy, Improvement and Engagement Team Leader at Dacorum Borough Council, is going to be speaking at Osborne’s Mapping Success With Customers slot at the Homes Event 2017 at Olympia, London.
Joining Carol Bailey, Managing Director of Osborne Property Services, on stage, Emily-Rae will be focusing on how Dacorum has used customer journey mapping to improve its services.

She will explain how, in partnership with its repairs and maintenance provider, Osborne, the local authority has taken the findings from a customer journey mapping session with leaseholders, held in April this year.

“Customer journey mapping places you in your customer’s shoes, allowing you to understand how they feel at each stage of a process.” explains Emily-Rae. “By working with our customers we are more likely to get the basics right, so that we build on these foundations to improve their whole experience.”

In March this year, Emily-Rae led Dacorum’s housing service to become the first landlord in the country to achieve the Tpas Pro Landlord Engagement Accreditation.

The local authority places great emphasis on working with its residents to shape services.  Many of its 10,000+ tenants get involved regularly, so Dacorum wanted to build on this success to establish a more meaningful relationship with their 1,700 leaseholders.  The customer journey mapping session with a group of leaseholders was the first natural step towards delivering an even better service.

The relationship we have with our leaseholders is different.  We can’t assume we know what they would like to see from our service so it’s important they have the opportunity to tell us their priorities and experiences.

The session, facilitated by Osborne, gave Dacorum some great insight into how leaseholders view the information on its website and their expectations around communication.

This and other engagement activities such as the Tenant Inspector group have brought valuable changes to services.  For example, Osborne runs Dacorum’s customer contact centre.  All its operational and customer service staff members have taken part in dementia awareness training run by AGE UK based on a suggestion that older and vulnerable people need extra help and patience when they call in to report a repair.

Following on from these sessions, Dacorum and Osborne have continued working with leaseholders and will be setting up a Leaseholder Forum early next year. Through the Forum, leaseholders will get to know the faces behind the service and can take part in more customer journey mapping sessions.

Customer journey mapping takes time and effort, and Emily-Rae expects members of the audience at the Homes Event to question whether it is worthwhile.

“I’ll explain that, through customer journey mapping, you get to discover things you didn’t know!  By investing time and effort in developing processes with customers in mind, you are more likely to get it right first time.  This leads to improved satisfaction and delivers more efficient services.” sums up Emily-Rae.

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