A housing association realised that the majority of the issues or problems being reported to them were coming from a minority of customers. This was causing extra work but at the same time they were actually struggling to solve the customers’ issues due to the complexity or sensitive nature of them. New roles were created to address these specific customers which called for employees with a heightened skill set and experience of social work, mental health and social housing.
Before putting the new roles in place the housing association conducted research into the number of hours being spent handling interactions with this customer group as well as exploring with the customers what the underlying issues were including measuring their overall life satisfaction/happiness levels, which were only scoring on average 3 out of 10. By putting in place this dedicated team for the specific customer group the housing association were able to free up resource and time across all other departments, also saving them money. They remeasured the specific tenant group’s happiness levels and these increased to an average of 9 out of 10.