One in six tenants in our Housemark benchmark described putting in unnecessary effort to get something sorted. Not complaining about the repair quality, the staff, or the outcome. The effort of getting there.
And more than half of those comments were about the same thing: time. Waiting. Chasing. Sitting in all day just in case. Being on hold. Hearing nothing.
That's the effort problem in housing, and it's hiding in plain sight.
Most VoC programmes chase satisfaction. But effort is what tenants feel first, and it's a stronger signal of what happens next.
The original Customer Effort Score research found 96% of customers who report high effort become disloyal. Just 9% of those with low effort do the same. In housing terms: friendly staff and solid technical work won't save you if tenants have to chase three times, wait on hold, or reschedule their week around a vague "someone will be in touch."
Customer Effort Score is 1.8x more predictive of loyalty than satisfaction and 2x more predictive than NPS. An effort view of your feedback data is likely to give you an earlier warning of formal complaints and regulatory trouble than a satisfaction dashboard alone.
When tenants say something is too hard, they're rarely talking about one thing. Our analysis identifies four distinct types of effort, often overlapping in the same comment:
Time effort. Waiting, chasing, unclear timescales, being on hold.
Cognitive effort. Figuring out what to do next, decoding complex letters.
Emotional effort. Anxiety, feeling ignored, sitting in limbo.
Physical effort. Repeated calls, visits, form-filling.
More than half of all effort complaints are about time. Not complexity. Not technical detail. Just waiting and chasing. Typical language: "Reported them but I am still waiting." "I gave up after being in the queue for a long time."
Time becomes genuinely toxic when it combines with uncertainty. Comments about waiting without knowing score around 25 out of 100 in our sentiment data. That's the difference between "we're slow but clear" and "we've forgotten you." For anyone looking for a quick win on TSM scores, stripping time-based effort from your highest-volume journeys is almost always the fastest route.
You don't need to add another survey question. You can read effort directly from free-text comments in existing TSM and transactional surveys.
In our work with housing associations, we use AI to detect language that signals each of the four effort types, then track volume and sentiment over time. This produces a clear Effort Profile: which types of effort are rising, and in which journeys.
If you're starting from scratch, a manual version works too. Create four tags in your feedback system — time, cognitive, emotional, physical — and ask frontline teams to flag any comment mentioning chasing, confusion, stress, or repeated contact. Review a sample monthly and look for recurring friction points.
The pattern tends to be obvious once you're looking for it.
You can't eliminate every backlog. But you can remove the sense of limbo, and that does most of the damage.
Replace vagueness with real dates. "We'll be in touch soon" forces tenants to mentally carry the problem. A specific window — "Tuesday 10–12, 14th April" — cuts that effort even if the date is two weeks away. Comments about "no date" carry far worse sentiment in our data than comments about long but clearly communicated timescales.
Build proactive delay notifications. The delay itself rarely destroys trust. The silence does. A simple text saying "we're running behind but haven't forgotten you, your new slot is Friday 9–11" prevents what would otherwise become a formal complaint. Companies that proactively communicate delays see drastically fewer repeat contacts.
Sort call waiting. Call queue effort scores as low as appointment waiting in our data, mid-20s out of 100. Callback options, smarter routing, or digital alternatives convert "I sat on hold for 40 minutes" into "I requested a callback and got on with my day."
Cognitive effort shows up when tenants have to read a letter three times to understand it. Emotional effort spikes when people feel anxious or powerless, even when the underlying process is technically fine.
If a tenant says "I didn't know what was happening" or "I gave up," that's cognitive and emotional effort, not just operational delay.
Plain-language rewrites of standard letters and SMS templates help. So does replacing "we'll be in touch" with "we'll call you Tuesday between 10–12; text CHANGE to this number if that doesn't work." A simple status tracker — Reported, Scheduled, In Progress, Completed — reduces the need to chase and the anxiety of not knowing.
Every paragraph you simplify is also a call you don't have to answer. Reducing effort this way pays off twice.
Track three numbers monthly: volume of effort comments, average sentiment of those comments, and the mix of effort types. If 55% of your effort comments are about time this quarter and that drops to 40% after you introduce better appointment communication, you have concrete evidence the change worked.
The most effective landlords build a simple rhythm: review the Effort Profile monthly, pick one high-friction journey, change something specific, watch how comments and TSM scores move. The compound effect over time is powerful.
Tenants aren't asking for a dazzling experience. They're asking for a service that doesn't make them work so hard to receive what they were already promised. That's the effort problem — and it's one of the most solvable things in your data.