Starting from scratch
The freedom to create an entirely new customer engagement model has resulted in innovative resident-led processes at L&G Affordable Homes
Starting from scratch
The freedom to create an entirely new customer engagement model has resulted in innovative resident-led processes at L&G Affordable Homes
What would customer engagement from a housing provider look like if it were to be set up today, from scratch? For most housing associations, the question is purely theoretical, given they are almost always dealing with complicated and often unwieldy legacy systems and technology.
For Shaun Holdcroft, however, this is the practical problem he faced when he helped launch L&G Affordable Homes in 2019. Having worked in the sector previously, Holdcroft was familiar with the way more established providers have not always lived up to the promise when it comes to engagement.
“I think there is a really strong, earnest desire among people in the sector to engage with customers and to be responsive to feedback,” he says. “But too often, the imperative to do something about that sufficiently to drive change in the way the organisation is operating or the design is structured is relatively limited.”
Right customer outcomes
At the outset, Holdcroft and his colleagues wanted to ensure they didn’t fall into the same trap: “Arriving at L&G, my view was that we only ever wanted to engage with customers when we were serious about doing something with the information that they gave us, and that we wouldn’t allow ourselves to rest on an operating model or service model that might be commercially viable but wasn’t delivering the right outcome for customers.
“And so what we’ve tried to do throughout our journey is avoid getting too caught up in complex, costly and administratively burdensome structures that seek to engage customers. Instead we try to focus on understanding from our customers where we are failing and then enacting plans to do something about that or, having already had a plan in mind, bringing those customers into the design of those plans to see whether the execution fits with their experience or not.”
Shaun Holdcroft
Operations Director, Legal & General Affordable Homes
“We’ve tried to avoid getting too caught up in complex, costly and administratively burdensome structures that seek to engage customers. Instead we try to focus on understanding from our customers where we are failing and then enacting plans to do something about that.”
Beyond customer panels
The approach L&G has taken is a departure from the idea of customer panels or resident boards that the sector has tended to use in the past. Holdcroft breaks the journey of customer engagement down into three parts:
- identifying and documenting specific issues;
- co-designing solutions with affected customers;
- continuing to engage with groups of customers to test the newly created processes.
In the first part of this process, groups of between 15-30 residents who share an experience of a particular service or are in a similar geographic area are invited to record video diaries over the course of around two weeks.
“The real value in that is that you get a sense of what’s really going on in a customer’s life. And often you get a much more powerful sense of why us failing to deliver a service at the right moment in time has had such a substantial impact on that customer’s feeling towards us as an organisation [and] what’s it’s done to their life,” Holdcroft explains.
During the second phase, groups of customers are brought in to essentially help co-design a new process. “We’ll take a cohort of customers and then we’ll actually bring them into the conversation,” continues Holdcroft. “We’ll use them and their experience to help test whether the design solutions that we’re proposing would have potentially improved their experience or would have worked in solving the issue that they were raising.”
Senior staff involvement
At this point, senior staff members from L&G are also involved. Holdcroft says this is more about developing a culture than to do with the service design itself: “It’s a really great way for people who, to be frank are pretty well paid and pretty well off, to get a sense of what it feels like to walk in the shoes of our customers.”
The final stage involves taking on a panel of customers who have already been involved in the video diary or co-design process and keeping them involved by testing the service. “We send them the finished version of what we’ve created and we basically get them to push it until they can work out a way to break it,” Holdcroft explains. “And then we get them to feed back to us what it was that they think broke it.”
Working through service redesign will become easier for L&G after this summer, once it starts using an integrated Salesforce platform which will change the way customers interact with their landlord. Holdcroft says the organisation began investing in a “modern-day digital platform” on “day one”. This was a particular issue for L&G, as its business model involves it partnering with established housing associations which provide some management services, leaving customers initially with multiple points of contact for different services.
“It’s a really great way for people who, to be frank are pretty well paid and pretty well off, to get a sense of what it feels like to walk in the shoes of our customers.”
Blank slate
Holdcroft accepts that designing services that meet customer needs is easier when you come to it with the relative blank slate that L&G had: “We’ve basically built a platform that you can run a whole housing association on – that’s very easy to do when you haven’t got the legacy systems and all of the data migration to worry about that comes with an existing landlord.”
Nevertheless, he still thinks other organisations in the sector can learn from his experience, not least that the process of improving customer service is a necessarily iterative one. “The mistake I see too many organisations make is that they make it into a bigger problem than it necessarily is,” he concludes. “Most organisations look at the totality of the problem and think it’s going to take forever to fix and billions of pounds to solve it, rather than break it down to a set of bitesize problems and build within their confidence and capabilities.”
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