The New Compliance Reality
The Transparency, Influence, and Accountability Standard requires Social Landlords to use relevant information and data to understand the diverse needs of tenants, including those arising from protected characteristics, language barriers, and additional support.
In the realm of social housing, this understanding is not just a matter of policy; it's a prerequisite to being able to ensure that every tenant receives the support they need combined with fair and equitable outcomes and access to services. However, it's essential as a Social Landlord to ask yourself a crucial question: Do you really know your customers, who are they and what they actually need in order to have this equitable access to services?
With data quality being a constant and recurring theme, combined with the lack of integration between systems, many landlords do not have confidence in their ability to accurately rely on their basic contact data, before even thinking about enriching their tenant information to inform them on how best to improve and tailor their approach to delivering their services and engagement based on the needs of the tenant.
Whilst the asset is understood, the actual customer, the tenant is significantly less so. This has many profound consequences which the TIAS standard seeks to address, namely, do all tenants have real influence & fair and equitable access to services, as well as the information that they need to access said services & scrutinise their landlords performance?
Bridging The “Engagement Gap”
Traditionally, IT investment has largely been focused on the Asset side of the coin, creating a data and communication void with tenants which we call the “engagement gap".
This gap has prevented Social Landlords from really knowing their tenants and being able to use this understanding to more effectively design and deliver services. In a conversation with one large Social Landlord, the staff member recalled an incident where a tenant of five years told them that the checkout operator from their local co-op knew them better than their own landlord- the issue in question was the engagement channel used, in light of the tenant’s mental condition – they had expressed a preference for text, not phone, but the landlord continued to ignore this- a lack of systems integration being blamed.
This seems to be a prevalent issue, with the Housing Ombudsman commenting:
"We repeatedly found that a resident’s vulnerabilities had not been appropriately recorded, even when the landlord had been advised multiple times and the procedures explicitly stated that vulnerabilities would form part of the decision making process."
Investing in and leveraging modern technologies can help bridge the engagement gap and improve your consumer standards compliance. By establishing a single source of truth for tenant data - a “golden record” which is dynamically kept up to date and interfaced and propagated to other internal systems, housing providers can enhance their understanding of residents, create profiles, and tailor their services accordingly.
This creation of a golden record, which not only holds channel preferences, preferred times of contact, and understands the specific needs of tenants (especially those with complex needs, who require additional support), allowing engagement to be tailored, but also personalises the optional engagement content that tenants want to receive, leads to a much more personalised experience.
In the age of “Amazon-like” services, this is what customers now expect.
Additionally, to be compliant with the standard, Social Landlords need to be able to communicate with an advocate or representative, nominated by the tenant and take into account language barriers and protected characteristics, as well as any additional support needs.
Gaining Actionable Insights Right Across the Customer Journey
Understanding customers in terms of their diverse needs is only one side of the equation; we also need to gain actionable insights right across the customer journey including real-time surveys on transactional events such as repairs. To be effective, these insight surveys must dig deeper into topics where resident dissatisfaction has been expressed. This deeper understanding, coupled with the opportunity for the tenant to opt-in and help co-create better solutions, ensures that customers have genuine influence to shape policy, services, and decisions.
Engage-AI provides you with the tools to learn about your customers and start to build up a picture of the areas and services that they want to engage with you on, as well as embedding The Transparency, Influence, and Accountability Standard requirements into the customer journey, providing you with an audit trail and real data to evidence compliance. By integrating insight, compliance, and customer satisfaction management strategically, you can develop a deeper overall understanding of your customers and react to dissatisfaction drivers, whilst improving your consumer standards compliance and having the audit trail and data to evidence this. The Machine Learning capability also helps you to better understand & make sense of your data, leading to more insights that drive service improvement.
Building & Maintaining The “Golden” Tenant Record
We know that people change and so must your data; Engage-AI provides you with the tools not only to learn about your customers but to dynamically update this and also push this golden record data back to your internal systems to maintain a single source of truth. This not only cleanses data but helps other systems embed how customers with specific needs should be engaged with across all of your service areas. By helping you to really know who lives behind the doors of your properties, customers’ needs and wants can be better understood and integrated into service delivery.
After all, if you don’t know, how can you help?
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