How is the customer experience landscape evolving in the social housing sector and what should HAs be doing to stay on top of their CX efforts?
Customer experience teams are having their moment more in housing now than ever before and we’re seeing a huge shift in housing associations really leading the way when it comes to improving customer experience and prioritising customer feedback.
TSMs have been a huge contributor to this and are becoming a business as usual process for HAs. Now that social housing isn't just focusing on being compliant, they’re focused on doing the best for their tenants. We’re also seeing cultural changes with housing associations, with Orbit and Gentoo announcing the creation of customer experience focused roles, putting CX at the heart of strategic decision making.
As we look ahead to 2025, one thing is clear: housing associations are putting CX at the forefront of everything they do, and those that fail to adapt their CX strategies will risk falling behind.
So how can you ensure you have a CX strategy that prioritises truly understanding your tenants going forward? In this blog we’ll explore:
Social Housing is an industry driven by people, for people - and therefore it’s no surprise that the human approach to better CX is only becoming more important and customer-centricity is at the heart of decision-making for HAs, especially when it comes to analysing tenant feedback.
Traditionally, HAs were using methods like manual tagging to try and gain a sense of their customers' feedback. But CX teams discovered that relying on instinct rather than insight isn't the answer to truly improving tenant experiences. As one of our customers explained:
"When you're dealing with thousands of pieces of feedback, manually tagging comments for what feels like thousands of years isn't just frustrating – it means we're missing crucial insights that could improve our services."
These methods of feedback analysis bring about challenges such as:
In 2025, the most effective CX strategies in social housing are underpinned by a comprehensive view of customer data from all relevant feedback channels, data-driven action plans and reporting structures that ensure tenants needs are being met.
Understanding what matters most to your customers and shaping your actions, resource allocation and performance measures around those priorities will help build a customer-centric culture guided by your CX strategy. And all this is made possible by using the right technology.
Technology is wonderful in the sense that it can help us do things that human beings can’t physically do, even though we want to. As much as CX professionals want to do their customers justice and read every piece of feedback, it’s physically impossible for humans to fully listen to each and every customer, across each and every channel. But technology? AI can really lend a helping hand.
AI is great for taking an aspect of human thought - in the case of CX professionals - reading tons of text data and absolutely supercharging that bit of the process. It's then up to humans in CX teams to add value to the data once AI has done the heavy lifting.
Technology, specifically AI-powered feedback analysis - is helping customer experience teams in social housing to:
CX teams know that there are millions of things they can be doing to improve tenant experience, but being able to identify the things that will make the biggest difference is the key. This is where predictive analytics comes in. Tools that enable predictive analytics mean that housing associations can:
We have a great example from one of our customers, where predictive analytics meant they saved a whole ton of money. One of our housing providers identified a critical pattern relating to their boiler maintenance that was causing tenant dissatisfaction, not to mention a huge backlog for repairs which was causing frustration.
Our client pulled together a BI (Business Intelligence) dashboard, where they compiled all their complaints data about boilers and overlaid it with the age of boilers across all their housing stock and worked out that when boilers were 13 years there were multiple issues in quick succession and the cost of servicing the issues was greater than the cost of replacement.
This insight led to them implementing a preemptive replacement program when boilers were reaching the 12 year age mark, demonstrating how predictive analytics can drive both cost savings and improved customer experience. It wasn’t until they combined their quant and qual data that they were able to confidently make that link between the age of boilers and when things start to statistically cost them more money.
When you can start combining your numeric data and your text data, VoC becomes even more powerful and we believe that this is the direction that companies are heading in 2025.
Feedback frameworks are a great way to analyse feedback. For example having a TSM feedback framework means that you can connect customer feedback back to specific areas of the TSM regulations.
By tracking specific categories that are important to, or impact tenants significantly means that you can really hone in on granular issues under a high level category and use that to measure sentiment, see what things are changing month on month.
Frameworks, combined with text analysis, will enable CX teams to hone in on particular issues at certain points in time rather than just focusing on high level numbers and really dig in to what is causing specific issues and how to solve that and improve the lives of residents.
The shift from "we think" to "we know" is becoming integral to decision making and more housing associations are focusing on basing decisions on robust data analysis rather than gut feel. This means:
The future of social housing CX might seem daunting, but the time to start preparing is now. Success in 2025 will depend on:
The housing associations that will thrive in 2025 aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets – they're the ones that start transforming their approach to CX today.
AI will augment rather than replace human customer experience, helping housing associations truly understand tenant needs better and respond more quickly. It will handle routine analysis and monitoring, freeing staff to focus on problem-solving, resource planning and improving tenant experience.
Success metrics will evolve beyond simple satisfaction scores to include sentiment analysis, predictive indicators, and impact measurements. The focus will be on understanding not just what tenants think, but why they think it and the impact that CX initiatives have.
