Social Housing – Ultimately It’s All About the Residents and Their Experience
Social housing is complex. With all of the legal, compliance and budgetary issues that have to be juggled successfully, maybe there’s a risk that the core purpose gets overlooked. Whatever else we do as a property services partner, we never forget that social housing is about providing people with a home. And that needs to be somewhere that they feel secure and valued.
Out of all our KPIs and other performance metrics, the one that drives us most is the satisfaction levels of resident customers. If they don’t feel that the repairs and maintenance service works for them, then it isn’t working as it should. Safety, efficiency and consideration are the factors that guide us. They are the core principles of a positive resident experience.
Empowering Residents
Consideration is closely linked to empowerment. In essence, this means delivering a repair and maintenance service that residents help to shape and feel able to influence, rather than a set of processes that have been imposed.
Improving this experience in a meaningful way calls for more than periodic collection survey data. It requires a more forensic examination of customer interactions to extract the detail of what people like, what they don’t and how the service can be improved to meet their needs more effectively.
Most resident satisfaction surveys are effective at identifying areas that need to improve. But they provide precious little insight into how things need to be changed to make a meaningful difference. We always aim to go further.
From Contact Centres to Customer Experience
Contact centres play a critical role in improving the service and in understanding how the experience feels from the residents’ perspective. Because ‘contact centre’ implies a passive service we have re-engineered ours into ‘Customer Experience Hubs.’ This involves a significant investment in IT infrastructure to open multiple channels through which resident customers can interact with our teams.
Osborne’s aim is always to ensure that the service our customers and their residents experience is efficient, enjoyable and stress-free.
