Trevor Hampton, director of housing solutions at NEC Software Solutions, explores the power of finding out what people don’t like.
Do you dread phoning your energy, phone or broadband provider to ask a question, make a complaint or raise a concern? Is your expectation that you will be stuck waiting for your call to be answered or worse, your email or message will be ignored? Does it prevent you from reaching out in the first place?
If you’ve answered ‘no’ to any of the above questions then I’m jealous that you have been blessed with outstanding customer service and I’m interested to know which suppliers you use.
However, this is a big issue if tenants feel the same reticence about contacting their housing providers. It could result in people not receiving the right support and even falling into unnecessary hardship.
To create housing support that is human focused, it’s imperative we put ourselves in other people’s shoes and ask if we’re doing things they dislike.
Are you listening?
Technology has made it very easy for residents to choose their preferred way to communicate with their housing provider. But opening up multiple communication channels means that these all need to be monitored and actioned.
We’ve all read the disgruntled tweet or Facebook post where someone has turned to social media in frustration. Often people resort to public communication because they’ve emailed and called a company but their issue remains ignored or unresolved. A study from Shelter revealed that one in ten social housing tenants had reported an issue with their home more than ten times.
It’s obvious but missing messages or asking residents to repeat their complaint a number of times to different housing staff are just some of the things people dislike. And with the technology available today, it’s completely unnecessary.
Joining the dots
It’s now fairly easy to link all relevant interactions with a tenant so that a housing officer has instant access to up-to-date information on past and current communications with a resident.
A unified communication platform can help you understand the barriers to good communication in your organisation by putting any residents’ concerns, questions or repair requests into context.
For example, if a resident contacts their housing provider and explains they’re having problems with their boiler, all the messages are connected and linked so a housing officer can see that there have been a number of call-outs to the same property and a new boiler is required. A connected communication platform ensures there are no missing pieces of the puzzle.
In the same way that you can keep track of any communications with individual tenants, it’s also useful to do this on a more global scale across your organisation. Are there any trends of consistent breakdowns in communication with residents? Is there one channel that is frustrating people more than another? This information will allow you to address any areas that could be improved.
A personalised approach
As humans, we’re often looking for the easy option. It’s why we may choose to park in a more expensive car park because it’s close to the shops rather than park in a cheaper one that involves a longer walk.
By getting to grips with the things your residents don’t like, you can make things easier for them. For example, you might be trying to call a resident during the day but they’re at work so an email or text message would be more convenient for them.
Many housing management systems now have the capability to highlight things such as residents’ communication preferences. They can flag things such as ‘this resident doesn’t respond to calls but will reply to SMS messages or emails’, making it easy to choose the best way to engage with your residents.
If you’re not currently using this function, it’s worth checking with your HMS provider that you’re using the full capability of your system because there could be some useful tools to help improve relationships with your residents.
Make change happen
The truth is most housing providers are sitting on a goldmine of valuable insights. However, information on its own isn’t enough to offer effective support. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “People don’t care what you know, until they know how much you care.”
Another innovation that could help is harnessing the power of predictive analytics.
Predictive analytics looks at your data, spots trends and then alerts you to things that you might want to take action on. You might already run an automated check to get a good idea of who is most likely to pay or those who might be late with their rent this month. But what if the list could be segmented further? What if you had the ability to dive deeper into the information to get a clearer idea of each tenant’s situation.
If you can cross-reference information then you’ll be able to see that a tenant might have been late in paying their rent only in the last month or two but before that they had a fairly good payment record. If this is the case, it might be that recent late payments are the result of the cost of living crisis or maybe they’ve changed jobs and their new employer pays on a different day of the month.
Now let’s imagine that rather than repeatedly chasing for late payment, a housing officer can use the information to make proactive contact with the resident to see if they need budgeting support or a repayment plan before their arrears mount up.
Or how about if a resident calls about making a rental payment and because the housing officer has all the information about the person in front of them, they can check whether, say, a boiler problem has now been fixed or whether further help is needed – what’s not to like about that?
Finding out what your residents hate alongside the right technology enables you to focus on the individual, creating happier residents who are more likely to want to speak with you.
Trevor Hampton is the director of housing solutions at NEC Software Solutions.
