Tenant satisfaction
Less Regulation – Does this mean less focus on tenant satisfaction?
Along with a change in Government, there has been a plethora of changes that have taken hold in the social housing sector and many of these are likely to have far reaching ramifications for a number of areas. One of these areas that seems to have been overlooked is that of customer or tenant satisfaction.
Much can be learnt from the private sectors approach to monitoring customer satisfaction and also the practice of making the results public. The private sectors practice is that of asking the customer about every experience, how they rate it and would they recommend it to a friend, to enable the maximum insight to be gained to increase customer retention, value for money and as a result, profits. As with some companies in other sectors, some RSL’s do underrate the importance of undertaking rigorous and robust customer research – not just to monitor and improve the services they offer, but to also help to shape and form strategies and business plans for the future. Furthermore, some RSL’s perhaps do not realise the potential of doing customer satisfaction and how this can be used to generate or test new ideas, underpin supposition or simply use to put a toe in the water for new ideas.
In reality it may appear that the social housing sector is still on the starting blocks with respect to customer satisfaction, while the private sector crossed the finish line some years ago. That said, there will be some sceptics that ask, “Does the social housing sector really need to be as thorough as the private sector with its customer/tenant satisfaction research?”
This is the million dollar question.
The answer is….In the future…Yes.
Customers attitudes are changing and are likely to do so for quite a while. The introduction of the new tenure of affordable rent and the likelihood that at some point over the next few years many social housing providers will be building homes for private sale (to cross subsidise other development) means that competition between social housing providers will become much more critical.
In this challenging economy, this means that ‘customers’ will ultimately want to know how the social housing provider that they are dealing with performs in key areas compared to another in their area and how these organisations perform will matter more than ever. Customers these days are much more ‘savvy’ with respect to what to expect from a home builder/provider and these high expectations are becoming increasingly difficult to meet or even exceed. Customers want excellent service, exemplary value for money and they do their research to ensure they find it.
Looking at the practices of monitoring customer satisfaction over the years, it is clear that the importance of undertaking objective, comprehensive and reliable customer satisfaction research has been, and is still often underestimated and under-utilised by some social housing providers.
Compared to the private sector, the social housing sector has some serious catching up to do. Previous practices when undertaking customer/tenant satisfaction surveys are varied. Some organisations employ experts to undertake the survey for them while others undertake the survey in house, using some of the guidance provided. Inevitably, there are cases when the survey was done by inexperienced individuals, who did not necessarily understand the whole process, often resulting in questionable results.
In past years, the STATUS survey (the Standardised Tenant Satisfaction Survey) was used by organisations with only 3 key criteria reported centrally, which focussed on overall satisfaction with key areas. Currently, with the departure of the Housing Corporation and Audit Commission and the merging of the TSA into the HCA, there is no longer a requirement for this to occur.
So, with no requirement to report things centrally or publicly, how will organisations know how they are performing overall, and how can they report their performance to the residents that they are providing a service to? More importantly, how can organisations assess who is performing better than them and know how are they doing it?
This suggests that there is a significant opportunity that is being missed to publicly report the performance of RSL’s and showcase best practice to enable sharing. Not only will this assist with co-regulation, but this will also be a positive move in raising profiles and awareness for RSL’s embarking on shared ownership schemes and also undertaking development solely for private sale. Surely having their KPI’s reported publicly can only assist in generating interest and potential revenue for these organisations?
The benefits of undertaking any kind of research with customers is that it acts as a catalyst and provides the opportunity to generate a ‘panel’ of willing respondents to act as a ‘research group’ to test ideas for the future, therefore reducing research costs overall. Part of the benefit of doing this with a customer satisfaction survey is that respondents who would not perhaps be as actively involved as others can be involved beyond the usual residents boards and groups.
To try and make the process of monitoring customer satisfaction easy for RSL’s and also make the process significantly more cost effective, Lake Market Research are launching a syndicated survey of the STATUS survey offered to all RSL’s. One of the key ideas of the survey is to keep the costs down and provide cost certainty for RSL’S by offering the survey as a syndicate, spreading the cost across those involved and making savings by doing so. Part of the survey will also enable RSL’s to ‘buy in’ extra questions to test new ideas and only the RSL’s buying in the extra questions will see those results.
For the RSL’s it takes the headache out of having to wrestle with representative samples, response rates and other more technical aspects of research.
One of the key elements of the survey that will be crucial in the forthcoming years is that there will be benchmarking available against other organisations taking part in the survey. Key criteria will be presented with the topline performance of each organisation taking part presented in a ranked way. Lake hope to be able to publish these to enable sharing across the sector.
This is the first year that Lake have offered this survey in this way and they are hoping to generate some significant interest from RSL’s that are keen to monitor customer satisfaction, but also keen to keep costs down. There will also be the opportunity for other RSL’s who have already undertaken a survey to benchmark their results against the results gained from this syndicated survey.
For more information on the survey please contact Sharon Greenslade on Sharong@lake-research.com 01622 357 060 or Dr Jo Simpson on jo.simpson@lake-research.com for more information.
