Following the release of our extensive research into how landlords capture the customer voice, we are now pleased to share the findings from HouseMark’s online resident survey, completed by close to 8,000 people. This is one of the largest resident consultation activities carried out in recent years, with respondents from a range of landlord types and sizes. Residents shared their thoughts on what matters most to them, how they prefer to provide feedback on the services they receive and what they want their landlord to do with the results.

Three key findings from our research are:

• There is a clear desire from residents that their voices are heard. This is evidenced by the strong response rate to our survey (8,000 responses from 20 landlords) and the fact that the single biggest unprompted free text comment is that residents would like their landlords to listen to them and show they care.
• Landlords need to report satisfaction results to residents and be clear what they will do with them. Only 650 (8%) of the 8000 survey respondents had seen the results of a landlord survey. Of significance is that this group were 13% more satisfied than those who had not, and over five times more likely to think they had benefitted from changes made by their landlord as a result of feedback surveys.
• Looking after the quality of their home and delivering great customer service are the two most important issues to residents. Repairs featured prominently in the comments, but 70% of respondents described the ease of contacting their landlord as equally if not more important.

More detail on the results of the survey can be found here.

This survey, combined with six resident workshops hosted by TPAS, brings the research phase of our STAR review to a close.

What’s next?

As HouseMark moves forward to the design phase for a modern customer satisfaction framework, these top ten requirements have been identified:

1. Residents want their voices heard and want landlords to be transparent around what they do with the feedback provided.
2. Different residents prefer to be surveyed in different ways, and landlords are keen to get representative views by using a multi-channel approach. However, landlords are also keen to understand the impact of using different survey methods, such as online surveys.
3. Residents want surveys to be kept short and focussed on what matters to them.
4. Residents are particularly keen to see how their own landlord is improving over time.
5. Residents want to quickly and simply see results in an accessible format.
6. Landlords want to listen to residents and need a framework that helps them make better use of tenant feedback to drive service improvements.
7. Landlords are keen to understand how they are perceived generally through perception surveys that encourage feedback from residents they may not usually hear from.
8. Landlords also want to be able to understand customer journeys and quickly identify points of failure through the use of targeted transactional surveys.
9. Landlords in particular want to be able to compare in and out-of-sector but want to be sure the comparisons are fair, and variables are understood.
10. Landlords are keen to better use modern data-mining techniques such as sentiment analysis and predictive analytics to get more out of their data.

HouseMark has commissioned TLF Research and Acuity to further analyse the findings and proposals will be released in November. All landlords and tenant representatives will be invited to provide feedback.

We are also looking for a small number of landlords of varying shapes and sizes to help us test the proposed framework with their residents. Participating landlords will receive a summary report from HouseMark which compares their findings anonymously with other participants. If you’re interested in finding out more about this, please contact us.