1. To ensure your tenants know how you are performing as landlord.
Your tenants have more right than even to understand your performance against targets. Making this information publicly available and easy to understand is key. Tenants don’t want to have to hunt into documents hidden on your website. They want you to volunteer the information to be read and understood by them. You should:
- Post your satisfaction measures regularly on a schedule on your social media outlets.
- Produce public facing dashboards which are available easily online.
- Voluntarily send regular updates of your performance directly to tenants.
Best Practice Case Study - Bernicia
Bernicia share their satisfaction and operational KPIs with their tenants in an easy to read, well formatted report that they produce. This means tenants don’t have to go looking for information on how their landlord is performing: all the information they need is volunteered to them.
2. To help tenants complete regular tenant satisfaction measures.
Surveying your tenants regularly through their entire journey with you on satisfaction measures will become required. You must set transactional surveys throughout the customer journey. The white paper proposes a set of tenant satisfactions measures, and each of these fits into a point in the customer journey. You should:
- Gather satisfaction data on these set measures transactionally throughout the tenant satisfaction process.
- Give tenants the opportunity to participate in the measures that are relevant to them and their interactions with you, such as rent increase consultations or community upgrade priorities
- Control how often you send surveys to tenants to reduce survey fatigue and maintain high response rates.
Best Practice Case Study - Golding Homes
Golding Homes use a series of around 10 transactional customer satisfaction surveys across their whole customer journey to make sure they are analysing satisfaction everywhere possible. This includes repairs, ASB, tenancy support, new builds, new tenants, complaints and more. They use dashboards and reports to identify which areas of their business need improved most and target their resources to these areas.
3. To treat tenants fairly and with respect.
Treating tenants fairly and with respect will become a measurable key performance indicator (KPI), and your tenant’s perception of this will form the foundation. You must ask the question of them to find the answer. By asking tenants questions in various surveys about fair and respectful treatment they receive from you, you will get a true picture of this perception. You should:
- Ask tenants regularly if they feel they are being treated fairly and with respect.
- Follow up with tenants who answer no to this question with a request to tell you more.
- Pay attention to what people are saying in comments so you can make genuine changes to improve how you treat tenants.
Best Practice Case Study - Kingdom Housing Association
Kingdom Housing Association is so focussed on treating their tenants with respect that they have created a Tenant Charter which defines this focus on respect to their tenants. Respect forms part of their Customer CPR charter – Communication, Patience and Respect. They have released this promise publicly to their tenants, and shared it with them through multiple communications channels including social media.
4. To provide a good quality home and neighbourhood for tenants to live in.
A good quality home and neighbourhood means different things to different tenants. You must first understand their perception of these aspects before you can truly make informed decisions and changes to improve. Tenants are more than happy to give you their views on how they experience their own neighbourhood, but we must ask them regularly and in sensitive ways how they feel. You should:
- Ask tenants the questions in different ways to ensure an honest answer.
- Probe tenants to get to the bottom of the reasons for their negative answers.
- Use demographic data to target poor scores to particular neighbourhoods/types of property to make tangible improvements.
Best Practice Case Study - Northumberland County Council
Northumberland County Council deploy a real-time transactional survey after each repair, so tenants can tell them if the work they have done is finished and to a good standard. They pass through information from their internal systems about that repair, for example repair type, and use it to automatically identify where there are issues with certain areas of their repairs service, i.e. one type of repair getting lower satisfaction than the rest. This helps them to ensure they provide quality homes for their tenants.
5. To listen to your tenants.
Your tenants have a right to know that when they give you feedback on your services it is being read, understood and actioned. Acknowledging tenants’ feedback in a timely fashion is essential for this. Simply gathering data and reporting annual/quarterly/monthly stats isn’t enough. Tenants need to know that they can influence the organisation’ decisions by providing feedback. You should:
- Put in place processes to acknowledge tenant feedback where possible or appropriate.
- Monitor your feedback channels either manually or using a feedback platform to spot areas for improvement.
- Be open as an organisation to making changes to your services based on what tenants suggest.
- Publish a “You Said, We Did” communication regularly to demonstrate that tenant feedback is helping shape your services.
Best Practice Case Study - Silva Homes
Silva Homes use their feedback platform to truly listen to their tenants. When a tenant expresses a level of dissatisfaction in their transactional repairs survey, they present the tenants with the option to upload a photo of the area of the repair they are unsatisfied with. Using this survey question type, they can take advantage of the fact that a picture speaks a thousand words. They are able to really listen to their tenants and solve problems right away because they have all the information they need instantly available to them.
6. Ensure your tenants know how to raise complaints by launching a communications campaign
The White Paper recommends launching a communications campaign to ensure tenants know how to raise complaints.
You should use digital communications as a key part of this campaign, for better value for money and faster delivery. Tenants have a right to raise a complaint about your service but making this easy is your responsibility. You should:
- Actively encourage tenants to voice their concerns via a first-port-of-call feedback process, such as a complaints form on your website that is clearly marked from your homepage.
- Give tenants the information they need to know how to raise a complaint if they remain unsatisfied, via SMS, email, social media or post.
- Actively promote your complaints process regularly, and in a way that is easy to understand for all tenants, such as quarterly emails or via your social media channels.
Best Practice Case Study - Rural Stirling Housing Association
Rural Stirling Housing Association consulted their tenants last year on the new SPSO Complaints Guidance. They shared the new process for making a complaint with their tenants voluntarily and openly, and even asked their tenants for their views on this. They used the responses to their consultation to guide how they share future policy and process changes.
7. To implement continuous improvement in your tenant engagement.
It’s not enough to simply make an improvement and say “that’s us done”. The new emphasis is on constantly seeking suggestions on improvements from tenants, with a view to genuinely implementing them. By asking tenants for suggestions and listening, you can involve them in creating a better landlord. You should:
- Catalogue tenant suggestions made throughout all engagement and feedback activities.
- Identify the most popular and achievable ideas from tenants (“reduce my rent to £0” is not an achievable one).
- Instil an organisation-wide culture of improvement, including making it easy for colleagues to suggest improvements that are taken seriously.
- Make sure to tell tenants that their suggestions have been heard and implemented when you do.
Best Practice Case Study - Wandle Housing Association
Wandle Housing Association want to ensure that across the whole business there is a culture of continuous improvement and a desire to make things better for tenants at every level. To help this, they display their key satisfaction metrics from repairs, ASB, complaints and more, visually on dashboards. This makes sure the whole business can have visibility of performance and focusses teams on where to improve.
8. To deliver more frequent opportunities to influence the service you provide.
Tenants must be involved at every phase of your decision-making process on the services you provide. To do this, you must seek feedback at every stage of the customer journey. When you offer feedback opportunities at more stages of the customer journey, you gain a better understanding of where you need to direct your resources and attention. You should:
- Implement more transactional surveys.
- Conduct more frequent consultations with tenants.
- Use feedback and engagement activities as information gathering opportunities, not just box-ticking activities.
Best Practice Case Study - Grampian Housing Association
Grampian Housing Association aim to survey tenants at all stages of the tenant journey. Like most housing associations they started off only surveying at certain transactions with the highest volume but are moving forward now with surveying at many more interaction points with tenants. Their aim is to have over ten transactional surveys, automatically sent to tenants in real-time, giving them the insight they need to focus on improvements in the best areas.
9. To consult on more targeted and relevant decision making with tenants.
Being involved in every decision is not what tenants want – they want to be consulted on decisions that are relevant to them. Targeting your consultations achieves this. By making use of the high degree of demographic information you have, you can consult relevant tenants about everything from building safety to neighbourhood safety. You should:
- Identify which tenant segments are affected by the topic being consulted.
- Group those tenants together and use batch or push messaging to access and communicate with them easily.
- Make use of the information tenants take the time to give you to make decisions and guide your processes.
Best Practice Case Study - Castles and Coasts Housing Association
Castles and Coasts Housing Association had a local playpark that they wanted to renew and add new equipment for the children in the neighbourhood. They wanted to make sure the tenants in that area had a say in what equipment was installed, since they and their children would be the ones to use the park. They consulted in a targeted way to only people in that locality, both tenants and non-tenants, and were able to create a space that the community felt involved in and could take care of.
10. To give tenants tools to influence their landlords and hold them to account.
Tenants need to feel able to give their views and easy to have access to your performance as an RSL. Implementing a good tenant engagement platform can provide your organisation with a cost-effective solution to these requirements. To do so manually or using Excel, etc., would take too much time and resource. Modern customer experience (CX) platforms can automate the vast majority of the manual processes and give you easy access to the end result – more engaged and informed tenants.
Our CX-Feedback platform is providing these tools to over 50 of the UK’s best landlords right now. It’s enabling them to fulfil their White Paper requirements, while simultaneously giving them the information they need to create better services, better neighbourhoods, and better homes for their tenants. Click the link below to book a 20-minute demonstration of how CX-Feedback can help you get on top of the new White Paper requirements