With the housing industry facing many challenges at the moment with everything from new consumer regulations to channel shift and digitalisation issues, it’s a key moment in social housing to make sure you’re engaging with those that matter the most - your tenants.
Our Product Manager, Thom Shackleford, gave a talk at Housing 24 where he spoke about this and acknowledged that a prescriptive approach to housing has not led to the best outcomes in the past. Thom hails from New Zealand and spoke about how they often hold regular meetings or ‘huis’ in order to get the opinions from social housing tenants, to engage with communities, and bring about digital transformation.
Within this blog, we delve into what Thom was discussing and how you can gather more insights from your tenants and customer base. To watch the full segment of Thom's talk, click the video below.
What we’re doing at Prodo
With consultancy being one of the services we offer here at Prodo, this involves us going into a housing association and assessing the current IT solution offerings they have in place. We like to work very closely with our customers, holding focus groups, and surveys so that we can understand what their pain points and current frustrations are.
It’s only after this that we can then use this information to create a strategic roadmap and data plan to create a more driven tenant experience. At this stage, we can look at solutions, such as implementing our portal and app that have been shaped by the experience of working with hundreds of landlords over the years. These digital solutions allow tenants to carry out self-service activities, such as paying their rent and raising repairs.
Video: Prodo's new portal due to launch 2025
Let’s take a closer look at digitalisation
Often, the issue with digitalisation is that something is implemented too fast, as a quick fix or a blunt efficiency tool as a result of some problems that have come to light with customer satisfaction or communication, but a channel shift should never be forced.
It should be something that’s worked on together, with your customers to ensure you get it right and build out the functionalities that they need and value, otherwise, you run the risk of poor tenant experiences and a poor UX, potentially leading to an erosion of trust between the user and the organisation.
Why engagement matters
Making your customers a part of your digital transformation strategy sends the right signals that you care about their needs and the quality of their experience. Having their input during the development allows them to take ownership of the product and buy in to it, all of which will encourage engagement and a great UX.
When it comes to the willingness to go digital, you’ll no doubt find that most of your customers are already using digital services to manage other aspects of their lives, including banking, which sees 94% taking advantage of the convenience of online banking. However, from surveys we’ve done in the past, we found that 20% of customers were hesitant to adopt a new technological solution because of issues they’d found with the current setup. These issues included problems with accessibility and onboarding, a lack of comprehensive self-service (such as still having to call a landlord for an update after having raised an ASB issue), and difficulty in reporting and scheduling any repairs.
Onboarding and access and the positive results we’ve seen
Portals often fail at the first hurdle by them requiring tenancy references or payment references in order for customers to gain access and this often adds an unnecessary point of friction to the onboarding process.
We worked with one client who did away with the need for those obscure references and instead, focused on other validation points, such as email authentication and dates of birth. From taking this action, they found they had a 250% increase in the number of registrations.
It's also important to make sure that you're thinking in a digitally inclusive way. We're working with an organisation at the moment called Stepping Stone who offer transitional facilities to people who are moving out of homelessness. And because these people have complex problems and far bigger things to worry about than a password, a regular email password setup just wasn't going to work for that customer base.
Due to this, what we did instead was to enable people to sign in via SMS messaging. They would receive a one-time password (OTP) to enter the portal and request the services they need.
Reporting repairs and what customers are looking for
Reporting a repair counts for 40% of inbound calls and is therefore the number one service request item. Customers love the convenience of bypassing phone lines and scheduling repairs whenever is convenient for them, but it has to be done correctly.
A lot of solutions are based around diagnostic pathways where users will answer a series of questions defining what the problem is and where the problem sits, enabling the correct jobs to be raised to the right teams. However, in the event of a pathway leading to a dead end, whereby a customer has spent time clicking through to the end, only to be told they need to call up anyway because a particular service isn’t available, this can cause a lot of frustration.
With this in mind, we’ve been looking at what we can do to help circumvent these issues. We’ve worked with some customers on a series of repair reporting scenarios, using a tool called TreeJack to help us plot the issues faced with the help of a heat map. This helped us to see the typical journeys people took when reporting a repair and when we interviewed those customers afterward, it gave us the qualitative and quantitative data we needed to create more streamlined, frictionless pathways that resulted in a better user experience.
What the future holds and how AI capabilities can help
As well as using heat maps to help us track potential changes on a customer’s pathway, we’ve also been utilising AI.
We've developed a tool that can recognise common objects around the house. So, for example, if you’ve got a boiler, you can take a picture of it and our tool can recognise that it is a boiler and even recognise its make and model, feeding that information back into a Housing Management System to help capture those bits of information that often aren't there.
On top of this, there is a speech-to-text functionality, whereby a user can specify where the problem they’re having is. We’ve found this really important as it helps us to expand on this type of information over time so that people can speak in their own native languages, enabling improved accessibility, and keywords can be identified to help allocate the right jobs with the right people.
It's only through collaboration that solutions can be found, so make sure you’re gaining the most out of your customer base. If you’d like more information on how we can help you do this, as well as enhance your digital transformation offerings, book a call with us today.
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