WDH was established in 2005, and has become one of the country’s largest providers of social housing, with over 32,000 homes around Wakefield and the north of England. The organisation prides itself on delivering excellent customer service, and had a strong track record of high satisfaction scores when Andy took over two years ago. He knew he had a difficult task in front of him, to continue to build on already high performance, but who could have known back then what we were about to come up against?

“There were some challenges I knew I was going to face as Chief Executive, but if I'm honest a global pandemic was not one of them. A digital transformation was something we needed to do anyway, although Covid has accelerated it.”

This is a sentiment that comes up again and again when you talk to people about the changes that we’ve all made to our working practices over the last couple of years. Covid has forced us to jump down a road that we were already moving along (perhaps more reluctantly than we should have been!).

What’s interesting about this is a ratchet effect, as some of the new behaviours that have been forced on us stick even when they’re no longer the only option. We’ve seen this in our own research into consumer behaviour changes during the pandemic  as well as in employment trends, but Andy comments on how it affects channel choice in social housing:

“Lots of people who we thought would struggle to switch to online and telephone were forced to do so during Covid, and did not switch back afterwards, even when they've been able to.”

When we look back on the long-term changes to ways of working and interacting that started during the pandemic, this ratchet effect is what we’ll need to understand them properly.

“I think it's just accelerated what was going to be an inevitable direction of travel and I don't think there's any going back from that.” 

On top of the direct impact of the pandemic, like many organisations WDH has had to deal with knock-on effects such as supply issues and shortages of labour and goods, all of them combined with the impact of Brexit and one-off shocks such as the blockage in the Suez canal. Andy is not alone in hoping things calm down a little in 2022.

In social housing the demographics and needs of the customer base make it unlikely that digital channels will ever be the only way for customers to interact with their landlord, but Andy feels that technology is crucial to the future. The main driver, though, is not cost-savings, but ambitious plans for improving the customer experience.

WDH has boosted its internal capability, and increased budgets to allow for new hardware and software, as well as restructuring around a new director role. All of this is necessary to make progress at the speed Andy believes is necessary.

“People were very patient with us during lockdown and Covid. Our customers understood the challenges that we faced, and I think we were pretty good at understanding the challenges they faced and that bought us some goodwill, but they want to interact with us in a different way. They're doing that in other walks of life, and if we don't keep pace with that I think their patience will quite rightly wear thin. We've got to move with some real speed.”

There is often a perception that customers are reluctant to move to digital channels, but the ease with which they embrace the likes of Facebook and Amazon suggests that this resistance is often to the way in which digital has been approached, rather than the technology itself. In many cases it is customers who are frustrated with the reluctance of suppliers to move to more convenient digital channels, not the other way round.

“It's a bigger customer base than we sometimes think, it’s not just young people. We can make it simple, and for lots of our customers it'll give them a much better experience. I think the scope to improve our offer is immense.”

Andy talks about the possibility of using voice interaction (through virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant) to improve accessibility, as well as the scope to offer services in a wider range of languages to support the diverse community that WDH works within.

We’ve been talking about “customers” throughout, but even that terminology can be a little contentious. Are social housing customers really “customers”? Perhaps we should refer to them as tenants and residents? It’s a semantic point, perhaps, but Andy believes it is an important part of a mindset that puts customers’ needs at the heart of decisions made throughout the business.

“Our staff do think of our customers as customers with choice, even though perhaps some of them don't actually have the level of choice that you would normally associate with the customer. That's how we think.”

Just as small differences in the experience can make a big difference to customer satisfaction, this kind of thing can make a big difference to an organisation’s culture. When he took over as Chief Executive, Andy was asked if he had any plans to outsource aspects of the organisation such as repairs. His answer was “no, not as long as the service to customers is good”.

Many staff live in the same communities as their customers, and this can create a real sense of connection and pride. How does he go about building on that to spread a customer-focused mindset throughout the organisation, especially when so many are working from home? It starts by being visible:

Organisations often have a very simplistic view of customer research, seeing it as direct feedback from customers that they either act upon or don’t. This is a total misunderstanding of what customer insight does well, which is help you to understand how customers see the world, and why it looks like that to them.

“Even if what we did wasn't wrong. If we've had a complaint, somebody felt it was wrong. Was there something we could have done slightly different to make that customer feel better? It might just be communication.”

Those moments where a customer and an organisation see things differently always present an opportunity to improve the customer experience, without necessarily just doing what customers ask for. Andy gives a great example of a customer who complained because they wanted some trees cut down. The trees were perfectly healthy oak trees, so there was no reason for WDH to cut them down, but that doesn’t mean that the answer has to be a flat “no”.

“The customer may not be happy, but they deserve a rationale for it. I don't expect that every customer is going to agree with our decision making, but we should be respectful in the way that we go about it.”

As so often when these perception gaps turn up, the secret is to do some digging so that you can understand what’s going on from the customer’s point of view. When you do that it often turns out that the “unreasonable” customer is actually being perfectly reasonable, given their experiences.

The importance of that human connection to customers means that self-serve interactions, however well designed, are never going to be right for every customer or every situation. When customers need to speak to a person, it’s important that they’re able to. Andy believes that, even in digital channels, it’ll be important to have a person available on screen if the customer needs help. As a rule it’s when things are going wrong, or the customer is stressed, that person to person contact is vital.

“When it's emotional, when there's something you need resolving, I think you do want to speak to someone, and that's why we need the different channels.”

Retaining person to person, and even face to face, interactions doesn’t mean that everything has to stay the same. There’s potential for hybrid working patterns to improve the flexibility of WDH’s in-person service.

“With more agile working, rather than having a lot of large offices we'll probably end up with smaller touchdown points. We've been able to respond quite quickly to reshaping some of our property requirements.”

I asked Andy about the business case for investing in customer experience and employee engagement in social housing. It’s easy to make a moral argument that treating customers well is the right thing to do, but can we make a financial one?

“Customers have choice, and there's increasing choice (which is a good thing). I think that keeps us on our toes. There is absolutely a business case for increasing customer satisfaction, because customers are more demanding. And that's right, we should be pushing standards, and customers expect that because that’s what they're getting in other walks of life. We need to improve to remain viable, because people will walk the day we think that we're untouchable.”