We’ve recently revamped our customer influence offer. Here, Craig Taylor, Director of Customer Operations, reflects on the changes that have been made to ensure customers have a say from the living room to the boardroom…
We all know that listening to our customers – whatever sector we work in – is vital. But this couldn’t be truer in the social housing sector.
Developing a strong, positive working relationship with our customers, enabling them to directly influence the decisions we make, can only help us provide better services.
That’s why, since merger, my team, led by Trudy Hawkins, Head of Customer Experience, has done a lot of work to improve our customer influence and engagement offer.
Recently, we launched our new Customer Influence Framework.
This new approach is built around six key focus areas, shaped by colleague and customer feedback and using the TPAS ‘Path to Engagement’ model.
This will help us stay focused on what matters most—making engagement meaningful, inclusive, and effective.
The six key focus areas are:
1. Lead – Inspire and Influence
Empowering customers to influence decisions
2. Collaborate – Stronger Together
Building shared responsibility with customers
3. Co-Create – Transparency and Accountability
Keeping customers informed and involved
4. Chip-in – Fairness and Respect
Making engagement equal for everyone
5. Opt-in – Inclusive and Accessible
Making engagement easy and open for all
6. Be Aware – Customer Centred Culture
Making customer feedback a core part of Amplius.
Our new Customer Involvement Framework places the customer voice at the heart of shaping our approach to strategy and service delivery.
It offers customers various levels of engagement and influence, making sure their input stretches from living room to boardroom, no matter how involved they want to be.
We co-designed the framework with more than 500 customers and colleagues. Customer input shaped our approach to involvement and engagement – clearly demonstrating how we use customer voice to shape strategy, leading to their voice influencing everything that we do.
From this work, it was clear that our customers have busy lives, meaning they’re only able to get involved at a particular level or at a time that suits them. For this reason, we’ve developed a Menu of Involvement.
We’ve created a Customer Influence Panel, which holds us to account in respect of the delivery of our two-year action plan and reports directly into our Customer Experience Committee, which in turn reports into Board.
With a customer sitting on our Customer Experience Committee and our Board, it demonstrates our approach to ensuring our customers have a voice right from living room to boardroom.
Recognising the importance of influence and engagement at a local level, as well as our Customer Influence Panel, we also have three Regional Customer Panels in the North, Central and South of our geography to ensure local issues are prioritised.
The regional panels report directly to the Customer Influence Panel.
We’ve also launched a new online engagement platform, Voice, which enables us to engage with our customers digitally.
Through our psychographic customer segmentation, we know that 30 percent of our customers prefer to engage with us online, so we’ve developed our Customer Influence Framework to ensure that it’s fully inclusive of our customer base, ensuring engagement is fully representative and can be accessed by everyone so that all our customers’ voices are heard.
Our customers have also been actively involved in shaping our Corporate Plan and will be working with our Board and Executive Team around the strategic deliverables from it.
Through this framework, every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to build trust and deliver value.
By aligning services with what customers need, we can improve customer experience and satisfaction, meet regulatory expectations around fairness and inclusion, and build stronger, more resilient communities.
Ultimately, by ensuring our customers’ fingerprints are visible in shaping all our services from policy to strategy to delivery, we’re delivering services that our customers have told us they want and need, enabling us to build trusting and strong relationships with them.
It’s also important that we share with customers how their voice has made a difference.
Through our Continuous Engagement Cyle, we’ve developed a loop where our customers are informed through a range of different media and methods what we’ve done and the impact their voice has made.
This should all lead to enhanced customer satisfaction levels.
Since it’s implementation in May, we’ve seen overall customer satisfaction increase to 80 percent, up from 76 percent prior.
Complaints have dropped by 55 percent and stage two escalations have reduced by 24 percent.
These figures demonstrate that the impact our customers are having in enhancing our services is overwhelmingly positive and we can’t wait to take this further.