In developing our 2025 Corporate Plan, we set out an ambitious but clear objective; by 2025, over 90% of Tai Calon tenants will be satisfied, or very satisfied, with the overall service that they receive.

 

The traditional way of collecting feedback was mainly phone and paper based. This was time-consuming, expensive and led to feedback not being recorded for several weeks after receiving the service. We also needed help quickly gathering enough feedback to generate detailed insight, typically only collecting 100- 200 insights monthly. 

Ross Watts, our Head of Customer Experience at Tai Calon, led on developing a solution and embedding this innovative change. Ross explained, “With this as a starting point, we knew Tai Calon needed to find a solution that allowed us to gather and analyse higher volumes of feedback in a simple, flexible, and intuitive way and that’s when we decided to work with Rant & Rave. Pace was important, and the new system was built and running in weeks.” 

To make it easy, quick and accessible for our customers, we started collecting customer feedback via SMS, email and web-based surveys. These were all channels that customers said they already liked and were actively using. It became clear very quickly that the investment was worthwhile, initially receiving around 300 items of feedback a month at a response rate of over 20%. 

We now collect insight directly from customers the day after they have received a service along with a scored customer satisfaction question (with a range of scores from 1 to 5), we use an open question asking why this score was given. This question specifically gave us a new insight into what makes a great service experience.  

We have seen two significant benefits in the initial phase of working with Rant & Rave. Firstly, we knew almost instantly if customers weren’t happy, which meant they could call us to resolve things the same day. The second was the ability to share great customer feedback about Tai Calon employees directly with them in real-time, both of which weren’t possible using the old approach. This helped us build significant momentum to reach 90% customer satisfaction.  

Within a few months, response rates increased to over 25%, meaning we were collecting around 700-900 items of feedback every month. We learned quickly that our customers were overwhelmingly positive about Tai Calon employees, having received over 6,500 items of feedback referring specifically to the high levels of professionalism, politeness, and helpfulness of staff.  

Comments included… 

“Good polite staff and service done professionally.”  

“Pleasant and polite and great communication.” 

 “I stressed about my situation, and she was very helpful, so put my mind at ease.”  

 

Using the dashboards provided by Rant & Rave, we can also easily see patterns emerging about the main drivers of satisfaction and where Tai Calon needed to pay attention to make improvements.  

We were also able to learn more about what was causing higher levels of dissatisfaction, which included the capability to deliver services right the first time, the time it took to complete repairs fully and the speed at which we could deal with customers’ requests and queries.  

We have analysed over 13,000 items of feedback creating over 10,000 pieces of data and comments on which we could act. This data has led to several improvements to the customer experience business-wide, with the most significant changes in our reactive repairs and maintenance service, repairs planning and customer contact centre. Based on the insights we gathered, we have already:  

  • Changed the way we plan and prioritise repair work, creating more flexible appointments for customers. 
  • Commissioned new services where we knew our capability was falling short of providing the service our customers expected.  
  • It has improved our processes for dealing with jobs that required either more time to complete or more than one visit to fix. This resulted in work getting done quicker and customer communication improving. 
  • We changed how we booked stock condition surveys, improving access rates. 
  • Increased the number of queries our customer contact team can resolve for customers at the first point of contact. 

Our improvement work has increased customer satisfaction scores across our repairs and maintenance service from 86% in May 2021 to 93% in February 2023.  

To finish, a recent customer said …
“The service was quicker than I thought it would take, and the electrician was friendly, open, down to earth. He made me feel like there wasn’t a stranger in my house! Honestly, perfect service!”  

Having real-time, daily customer insight to share and learn from has shifted the conversations in everyday work to ones focused on improving customer experience and raising levels of customer satisfaction.

 

by,
Andrew Myatt, Director of Communities and Housing