Innovation is a word we hear a lot across our sector. Whether at a conference, in discussions over Twitter or in our own boardrooms, the ‘I’ word still reigns supreme. I believe that if we’re to work together to solve the housing crisis, doing things differently is key.
Like most of the housing sector, RHP has spent the best part of ten years talking a great deal about innovation. The 2015 rent cuts meant that we all had to adapt quickly to reduce costs while maintaining excellent services. And we’ve made good progress along the way, with the launch of our fully-digital housing service (RHPi), experimenting with modular construction and delivering various enhancements to our employees’ experience.
Over the past decade, we’ve successfully adapted how we deliver our services, including the transition of our core services online. However, we’re now facing the reality that the things that helped us get to where we are today won’t take us any further; some of our solutions we’ve implemented in the past have made our technology and processes quite complex.
Feedback to reality
How do we know? Many employees and customers have contributed through interviews to build a picture of where we’re brilliant and where things get stuck. Additionally, we know that customers’ needs and expectations are increasing rapidly, and if we’re to thrive we need to change the way we do things.
Finally, we have a ‘burning platform’ in the fact that our contract with our repairs partner ends this summer. We see this as a perfect opportunity to improve how we work internally and with our new repairs partners to deliver a seamless service.
Of course, we want to push the boundaries to improve what we do, which after all is what innovation is all about, but over the past couple of years we’ve realised that our customer perspective got a little lost along the way.
We’ve therefore decided to shift our approach from innovation to service design. At first glance, they might sound like the same thing, but there are some subtle and crucial differences.
Firstly, service design always starts from the end-users’ needs. We’ve realised that service developments, particularly around technology, can too often be built from an internal perspective rather than starting from what the customers’ requirements are.
Secondly, our people were telling us that while innovation was useful for establishing new products and services, it wasn’t necessarily helping to crack the daily, real-life problems that our customers and employees were facing. The methodology behind service design can work at a micro- as well as a macro-level.
A design for life
In the same way that ‘innovation’ can be open to interpretation, so too can ‘service design’. For the sake of clarity, here’s our definition: service design is all about taking a service and making it meet the users and customers’ needs; it can either be used to improve an existing service or to create a new service from scratch.
The Interaction Design Foundation has a service definition that I really like: “Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved. Designers break services into sections and adapt fine-tuned solutions to suit all users’ needs in context, based on actors, location and other factors.”
The foundation also uses an analogy which gives the definition a real-world perspective: “Imagine two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same coffee at the exact same price; service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other.”
These key reasons led to why we’ve developed our ‘Rewire’ transformation programme. Rewire is designed to bring people, processes and technology together to make it easier for employees to deliver services and, in turn, easier for customers to access them.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re using the start of our new repairs contracts in June 2023 as the catalyst to look at how we can do things differently. This is about getting our systems and processes right but most importantly it’s about ways of working and creating a seamless customer experience between different teams within the business.
The primary benefit Rewire will give us is having an integrated system so that we have a single view of the customer, with all of the information about them and their home in one place (previously we had separate asset and CRM systems). This will mean that whoever speaks to a customer will have all the information about them at their fingertips to resolve their query at first contact.
The foundation of this is getting our data right, so we’re concurrently working on a big project to transform how we structure and manage our data.
Rewire will also help us meet the challenges coming down the road around building safety and energy efficiency.
In relation to building safety, this will mean having a golden thread of data to hold a record of all the activities and records relating to our high-rise buildings and fire-risk components. And when it comes to energy efficiency, we will be able to analyse our buildings’ energy data to direct our investment decisions better and bring our buildings up to 2030 standard, including the use of smart technology in our customers’ homes.
We’ve established a variety of projects to get deeper customer insights, particularly around offering more inclusive services. For example, in our ‘In your shoes’ project, we’ve been asking customers from all walks of life to record their life stories; these audio storybooks are then shared with our colleagues so they can hear about new cultures and perspectives. We also plan to have our new starters listen to these stories as part of their inductions to RHP.
What I’ve learned is that service design and technology can work hand in hand. We’re excited to see what’s next and how both can help our customers and their communities, our employees and the services we deliver as well as help create a brighter and greener planet.
David Done is the chief executive of RHP.
