Tenant Satisfaction – Focus on Inputs Rather Than Outputs
New tenant satisfaction measures are getting a lot of attention. Setting up mechanisms to collect, analyse and act on tenants’ views about repairs, safety, complaint handling, engagement and neighbourhood management will be a substantial task for some providers.
But to paraphrase the old saying, it’s important that we don’t let all the new ‘trees’ stop us from seeing the forest. The big picture isn’t the survey, but whether the service is run in a way that genuinely makes people feel safe and engaged.
What really matters is whether the property services partnership is focused on quality, accountability and delivering social value. It’s a bit too simplistic to say ‘just concentrate on running an efficient and responsive service and the survey results will take care of themselves’, but there’s an element of truth.
The priority is to provide a good service rather than to measure it.
Resident satisfaction surveys should be an essential element of continuous improvement. They highlight potential gaps and weaknesses. How residents feel about their homes and neighbourhoods is arguably the most relevant measure of effectiveness you can have.
Useful Feedback Comes in Many Forms
Formalised annual surveys will give you some of the feedback you need, but not all of it. Surveys provide essential quantitative data. But is that the whole picture?
For efficiency, resident satisfaction surveys are likely to be carried out online. For many people this is a convenient option. Some, however, will find this to be a barrier. So there will need to be multiple options for providing feedback.
From our experience of running successful property services partnerships we also know that, often, the best way to understand how people feel about the service is to talk to them. Not everything you need to know to improve residents’ experiences and preferences can fit neatly into a survey form.
When the objective is to provide the best possible service, in the way that people prefer, it’s important to capture this type of unstructured input. An important insight might come from something as simple as a conversation between an operative and a resident following a repair – how will you make it easy to capture that?.
It’s essential to get the balance right. Sometimes as a consumer dealing with large organisations it feels as though collecting customer satisfaction data has become more important than providing excellent service. The focus is on outputs rather than inputs. Our view is that satisfaction surveys should inform rather than drive the process.
For more information about Osborne’s approach to resident engagement contact Jo Fletcher ([email protected]) or visit our resource centre.
