Whether it’s a boiler on the blink, a customer who’s struggling to pay their rent or someone wanting to end their tenancy, we often don’t know there’s a problem until it’s too late.
These are some of the problems facing all housing providers and why harnessing the power of data has the potential to revolutionise customer experiences by helping us to predict future trends and events.
For far too long, housing services have worked on an outdated model of waiting for things to happen.
Data and record-keeping
What happened at Grenfell and the tragic death of Awaab Ishak in Rochdale have put the sector’s approach to data and record-keeping under the spotlight. A myriad different systems and spreadsheets have created a perfect storm that has led to some of the worst failings the sector has seen.
This problem of poor data management has also been underlined in a Housing Ombudsman report which highlighted it as a persistent issue for housing providers, with more than half of respondents to a survey saying that they had trouble accessing records to respond to customers’ complaints. 82 per cent of respondents also said poor data management affected their ability to fully address those complaints. However, the Housing Ombudsman’s report also highlighted how the effective and efficient use of information is “the closest thing the sector could get to a silver bullet”.
This is why data is the very heart of Yorkshire Housing’s shift to a pre-emptive service which will mean we can act proactively on repairs, upgrade our homes and identify other potential issues before they become a problem.
In short, we’ll fix stuff before it breaks.
Most actions we take as an organisation create data in one form or another. By measuring the results of those actions and combining that with other data we collect, we can assess our performance, adjust our actions and make pre-emptive interventions to improve all aspects of the services we provide.
While some of the challenges we face with our data will inevitably take time to address, we’re always looking for opportunities that will allow us to improve day-by-day how we collect, manage and use data.
How we’ll become pre-emptive
Our move to a pre-emptive service will span the next few years and fully swing into action during 2025/26. We’re already laying the foundations by implementing the technology platforms we need to make it happen.
Having the right technology is a critical measure and acts as our starting point. This includes installing temperature and humidity sensors in our homes to help predict damp and mould problems, remote boiler sensors to predict heating failures and contactless entry systems for our blocks.
But we won’t stop there because we’ll take full advantage of new solutions when they become available.
We’ll harness the power of our huge data-sets to help us predict future trends and events, with our information being integrated with open-source data.
And there’ll be further improvements to our income collection system (Voicescape) to reduce arrears and provide early support for customers so they can stay happy in their homes for longer.
If we can prevent 10 per cent of all tenancy changes, we predict that could save at least £400,000 per year (at current turnover rates and average turnaround costs) – that’s more money we can spend on upgrading our existing homes and building new ones.
Predictive models
By using a combination of internal and external data, we can build predictive models so we can take a pre-emptive approach to customer service, whether that’s to fix something in someone’s home before it stops working or to provide extra support they might need.
This new approach will be brought together in the form of an analytics hub, combining all of the key ingredients we need to take us from being reactive to pre-emptive.
And we’ll apply this pre-emptive principle to the whole business and everything we do. By doing this, we will dramatically improve how we operate while transforming services to our customers.
Mark Shephard is the head of data, performance and information security at Yorkshire Housing.
