Housing associations are under pressure from multiple directions. Residents expect services that work for them, and complaints and feedback expose where those services fall short. As part of this cycle, regulators increasingly expect providers to demonstrate that tenants' views are influencing how services are delivered.
The challenge for leaders is that improving individual processes does not necessarily improve the resident experience.
A team can make its own part of a service more efficient and effective while inadvertently making the overall journey harder for the resident. When functions operate in silos, they may have limited visibility of what happens upstream or downstream. Each part of the organisation can therefore appear to be performing well while the end-to-end experience continues to generate dissatisfaction.
For CEOs and COOs, resident experience is therefore more than a service-design issue. It’s a question of whether services, processes, measures and the wider operating model are aligned around the outcomes residents need.
Customer needs define the minimum design requirements for a process. Miss a fundamental need and the process is designed to fail.
Resident feedback, complaints and satisfaction measures provide important evidence about how services are performing. But they are most useful when they do more than tell an organisation what went wrong after the event.
They should help shape what the service is designed to achieve in the first place.Housing associations need to understand who their residents are, what different groups need and expect, and how factors such as demographics and geography affect their experience.
This is where customer journey design comes in: mapping a service from the resident’s point of view, stage by stage, to see where the experience breaks down and why. In our customer journey design work, focus groups are run in partnership with resident involvement teams, testing existing resident personas against what the journey analysis has revealed. Kano analysis can then help distinguish between basic expectations, which create significant dissatisfaction when they fail, and features that have the potential to enhance the experience.
A kept appointment, for example, will almost always matter more than an excellent apology for a missed one.
There is a regulatory dimension too. The Regulator of Social Housing's Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard requires registered providers to take tenants' views into account when making decisions about how landlord services are delivered and to communicate how those views have been considered.
The strategic question is therefore not simply whether residents have been consulted, but whether there’s a clear connection between what residents need, how services are designed and the outcomes the organisation delivers.
As we've already discussed, individual processes can be improved without improving the overall resident experience. When teams work in silos, they may not see how changes in their own area affect what happens upstream or downstream in the journey.
At Reinvigoration, our customer journey work with Abri highlighted the importance of addressing this through end-to-end ownership. Someone needs to bring the relevant functions together, understand how each contributes to the resident outcome and help teams make the compromises necessary to deliver the right experience overall.
What works best for one function may not always work best for the resident. End-to-end ownership helps ensure those decisions are made with the whole journey in view.
There is also a balance to strike between standardisation and flexibility. Housing associations can serve resident populations with different demographics, needs and expectations across different geographical areas. A rigid process applied everywhere can work against the resident-centred approach the organisation is trying to create.
The aim should instead be consistency in the things that matter: the quality of service, the outcomes residents can expect and the standards against which experience is judged.
How those outcomes are delivered may legitimately vary.
Leadership therefore needs to determine what should be designed and governed centrally and where local teams need flexibility to respond to their residents and circumstances. The goal is not necessarily a standard process, but a consistently good outcome.
Understanding residents and their expectations also helps leaders decide where to act first.
During a diagnostic with one of the larger English housing associations, we assessed seven resident journeys against four criteria:
Resident impact
The important outcome was not simply identifying repairs as a priority. The organisation now had a consistent basis for deciding where its resources could create the greatest impact.
We know this is critical, as redesigning a resident journey can have implications far beyond the process itself. Delivering the desired experience may require changes to technology, information flows, capabilities, roles, governance, measures or organisational structures.
In other words, it can touch every part of the operating model.
No organisation has unlimited capacity to tackle everything simultaneously. Prioritisation therefore needs to consider where change can create the greatest resident and organisational impact, alongside what the organisation realistically has the resources and capacity to deliver.
Even a well-designed future journey will struggle if the organisation cannot implement and sustain it. Once the desired journey has been defined, the wider organisation needs to align around delivering it, from the processes and systems residents never see to the way success is measured.
That makes engagement with the teams behind the journey critical. On a programme with a London housing association, communication initially relied on steering group messages cascading through line management. In practice, those messages did not move consistently through the organisation. Some teams were considerably harder to reach than others, while one function operated so independently that it effectively behaved like a separate organisation.
Where the message did not land, change stalled, and so did the improvements residents were waiting for. Each internal team needed communication tailored to its role in the resident journey, rather than relying on a single route through the hierarchy.
If resident journey work ends with a consultant handing over a document, the organisation has gained a report. If it leaves people inside the organisation with the capability to understand, redesign and continuously improve their own journeys, it has gained a way of working that can survive the next reorganisation, transformation programme or period of operational pressure.
Alignment also needs to extend to performance measurement. Internal operational measures remain important, but they cannot, on their own, tell leaders whether the end-to-end service is working for residents. A function can hit its targets while the overall journey gets worse.
Housing associations therefore need customer-experience measures that connect operational performance with resident outcomes and strategic objectives.
Resident feedback, complaints, satisfaction and other relevant experience measures can help leadership understand whether changes are having the intended effect, rather than simply whether an internal process is operating as designed. Those measures should also create an ongoing feedback loop.
After redesigning a journey, the question is not simply whether the new process has been implemented, but whether it’s delivering the outcome intended for residents – and what the organisation needs to change if it isn't.
Resident needs change. Expectations change. Organisations and the environments in which they operate change too.
Continuous improvement therefore needs to work at three connected levels: process, service design and operating model.
That requires ongoing ownership of the end-to-end journey, visibility across organisational boundaries and mechanisms for bringing resident insight and performance information back into decision-making.
A process built without a fundamental resident need isn't necessarily underperforming. It may be working exactly as it was designed to.
For housing association leaders, that is the distinction that matters. Improving individual processes can create efficiencies, but better resident outcomes depend on connecting those improvements across the organisation: understanding residents, designing services around their needs, creating end-to-end ownership, aligning the operating model and continually measuring whether the experience is improving.
At Reinvigoration, our Simplify4Scale® approach brings those elements together: understanding resident needs and operational reality, simplifying the journey before scaling it, and building the capability to keep improving once the initial programme is complete.
If you're reviewing resident journeys, redesigning services or questioning whether your current operating model is delivering the experience residents need, we'd welcome the opportunity to discuss this with you.