tonysmiththathousingitguy @HousingITguy

Some thoughts on IT and UK SocialHousing from a unique perspective of over 27+ years working with over 140 RSL's, Councils and social landlord groups in the UK, Ireland & Australia. (c) No reproduction without prior/express permission Available for independent housing RSL implementation, procurement of HMS, Repairs, CRM, EDM, DLO, Financial, Scheduling systems, critical friend etc. In Scotland I work with the folks at Arneil Johnston Check us out on Soundcloud /housingitguy

Sunday, 27 November 2022

For What Its Worth

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Well what a wild few weeks for Social Housing.

We had from the Grenfell Tower enquiry, Phase 2 Overarching and Module 7 Closing Statements. Not that far from me in North West England, a coroner found that two-year-old Awaab Ishak, died from prolonged exposure to mould, in Rochdale social housing.

Both shocking to tenants, the sector and the outside world too. It should be no surprise that social housing providers appear out of touch, incompetent, willfully negligent, with greedy overpaid managers and Chief Execs. The Housing Ombudsman and Regulator appear uninterested, toothless too, to many residents who try to complain. Quite a few organisations deal with complaints shabbily or don’t take seriously, configuring their systems to deal with them.

I grew up in Manchester late 1960s overflow Council Housing myself and have worked with the housing sectors ICT (procurements, implementations, Critical Friend), now for over 25 years. In that time I have met a lot of excellent people, most doing their best for homes, communities and residents they manage. When I share that view with tenants or friends in rented accommodation, not many believe me. Perhaps its because I generally work with RSLs/RPs that are wanting to use their solutions to improve or migrate to new improved ones, that I see organisations up for change and transformation. I see few organisations stuck in the “We have always done it this way” groove. If that’s the case, its often a sure path to failure.

What does failure look like though? How best to test the water of how good an organisation is?

Well, its sure as hell not sending out satisfaction surveys and counting all that do not come back (as well as the ones rated ‘positive’), as ‘good’ too. Dear reader, YOUR organisation would never do that, would you? How do we measure how good places are, in our real world lives? It’s generally Tripadvisor, or more likely Trustpilot for bigger more expensive and important purchases. What’s more important than the roof over your head?

Have you checked your organisations Trustpilot score lately? The red flag on there I am sure you will agree, is too many one star reviews. Pretty much they are only one star, because you cannot post a review with zero stars ⭐️

On the back of the doom and gloom this last month, it was no surprise for the Daily Mail (who have form on this), pulled out the latest list of (Inside Housing) 2022 CEO salaries, to show the world, “Lavish lifestyles of the housing fat cats: After tragic case of toddler in mouldy flat, meet the bosses who are earning huge salaries while renters are stuck in squalid homes”. Even Richee Sunak (without additional claimable expenses, in his own state provided social housing at 10 Downing Street), doesn’t earn as much as these selected CEOs (apparently).

Original article - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11450981/After-tragic-case-toddler-mouldy-flat-meet-bosses-earning-huge-salaries.html

Looking at that list, you have to admit, based on bad publicity, ITV investigations and the odd BBC panorama on unlivable homes, some of the key culprits seem to have the best remunerated CEOS. Do you think they are worth it? These are all managing vast portfolios and (should be) exercising the responsibility, of keeping tens/hundreds of thousands of residents safe in decent accommodation.

Can you imagine taking the measure of CEO's compared to their Trustpilot scores. Imagine determining a recalculated percentage based on all Trustpilot scores of 2 stars (inclusive) upwards. Now that does not sound too difficult, nor too high a bar.

I didn’t think it could be, until I did a bit of an exercise to check all the organisations in the table. Obviously I gave Rishi a free pass, as the little fella has only been in the job just over a month.

The results in the table below may surprise you, they did for me.

Many are based on low numbers of reviews, however, all except four of the fifteen, have 50% or higher of one star reviews. Sanctuary managing 250k properties, comes top with 94% of one star reviews and an official TrustPilot rating of “Bad”.

Applying the 6% of remaining rated 2-5 reviews, to £402k, gives a calculated based on quality produced CEO salary, of £24,120 pa.

Using this same methodology, the OneHousing CEO would earn just £10,480 pa. In fact four of these CEO’s, under this methodology would earn less than a highly experienced housing officer working in London.

These CEO’s are tremendously lucky that they aren’t paid based on the ratings they seem to be racking up, so far as at late Nov2022. The big regret I have, and I feel the wider sector must have too, is these lazy poor ratings, tar everyone with the same brush. That includes everyone, right down to the small charity providing specialist accommodation, for just a few dozen tenants.

You will notice that there is one provider in that table, rated ‘Excellent’. Peabody have two TrustPilot scores, one from its SocialHousing arm and one from its sales arm. Reading the review comments, the latter’s satisfaction level is borderline insane. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all have an ‘Estate Agent’ head on, solving repairs, ASB, arrear and other issues quickly and efficiently for residents, always treating them as ‘valued customers’, never anything lesser?

How difficult is it for the sector to improve, particular its biggest providers, who should really be beacons lighting the way, not reinforcing a dodgy and generally incorrect stereotype? How difficult for the regulator of socialhousing is it, to do its job properly? Writing to organisations last week on ‘The Issue of damp & mould’, is trying to shut the gate, once the horse has bolted. Slightly comical too, considering we have a government currently that voted against decent housing standards in the PRS , just 12 months before the Grenfell Tower disaster.

It makes me wonder if we don’t tackle our own problems within the sector, it will be rather a lengthy wait for the Housing Regulator, or government regulation to force us to improve. One thing I do know, we have plenty of technology, systems and processes that can help us all. Maybe it’s the culture and the motivation angle, starting with our CEO’s, which if we really need, to properly change all this.

If we at Acutance Consulting can help your organisation with complaint solutions,

please just get in touch, for a friendly chat over a brew & some Hobnobs ☕😋.

Catch the blog monthly archive at
https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.

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Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Processed Complaints

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Following on from my blogpost last month, focused on how residents can effectively raise issues and complaints effectively, how should Social and Council Housing best effectively resolve/conclude them effectively.

Reaction to my previous post prompted a quite a few residents to share their experiences of complaints with their landlords on Twitter, a few can be accessed here and here.

Complaints and service fails will always happen, that’s life. As I reminded a supplier this last week, ‘nothing in life is ever 100%’, so don’t kid yourself or customers, that you are. When things go wrong, they invariably cost way more to rectify than they might have just to get the issue right in the first place. That’s why complaints should be embraced as a valuable means to improve, rather than buried as dirty embarrassments.

One of the biggest initial issues that residents have with complaints is how their Council or RSL will handle them and how to initiate one. If you are a Social Housing provider, is your defined policy easy to find on your website and can you initiate one from that page? We do tend to do most things from the internet these days, but do we also offer an Omnichannel approach, where residents can phone or walk in too, initiating one?

For example, YourHousing close to me in the North West of England offer good details on online Complaint/compliments (their capitalisation) here.

A refreshingly open approach 😉

I particularly like the Orbit Housing Group open approach on complaints here, which is also quite candid on numbers being received. The data nerd in me however, would like an ‘Other’ section at the bottom of that table, mentioning the missing 18.07%. How many other RSLs would be comfortable sharing their stats on their website? I haven't seen many.

Lets think about those initial complaints coming in then. If a compliant (or complement) can be submitted via a webpage, where does it initially get recorded? Ideally it should become a CRM interaction, possibly at that stage the start/update of a ‘case’ and initiate a workflow task, for a member of staff to action. If that initial request just goes into an email box (or possible spam if colourful or emotional language used), it might take days to progress/respond to, or start dealing with these. Where good quality self-service is available, ability to submit complaints (or related incidents etc including images/video) against a logged in resident, is of great advantage.

Inside your RSL, once successfully recorded or converted from a CRM interaction, how easy does your systems and processes allow easy access to staff who should have access, to have audited view/update of the whole complaint timeline? What residents might call 'their case notes'. This can be easily supported digitally by most well configured modern integrated Housing Management Systems, or a hybrid of HMS and CRM platform such as Microsoft Dynamics365, Salesforce or Netcall. Some competent standalone complaint solutions are available, although the lack of integration and ability to navigate a 360degree view of the resident, can severely blunt its overall effectiveness. Housing finance staff might be struggling to progress arrears, while being totally unaware of a significant complaint in play elsewhere. Better integration, including to document management (EDRMS) recording video, images, WAV files etc, ties everything together. Repairs are generally the biggest issue area and links of a case to offending Works Orders or Capital Works, helps present a high level view.

Once received we would hope that communication will be key, in keeping the complainant informed at all times. A good internal process should set targets for different types of complaints and this should be visible/shared with residents, to know what to expect. This is one area that clearly often falls down, leads to excessive additional requests in from residents and growing stress and frustration. If systems are set up correctly, much of the communication process can be automated via SMS, email, managing the complaint progression via intelligent self-service etc.

Recognise that residents trying hard to find out what is happening to their complaint and seeing very little in responses back, can easily appear vexatious (and unfortunately be sometimes labeled as such).

The good example below is again from Orbit setting resident expectations

Where next will the resident complaint go?

Above, a target of ten days, with updates every few days, puts residents in no doubt what the RSL is aiming to do. However what is to be done internally if staff are not keeping to targets? Most HMS/case management/CRM solutions enable automatic escalation of tasks and diversion, on occasions of annual leave/sickness etc. Often these are not correctly configured or enforced internally, email often being used instead. With the latter, tasks can easily be lost, too many staff cc:d in, often everyone assumes (wrongly) ‘everyone else is dealing with it’. So, switch these features on and let staff know all updates belong on the case, not via email. Case time & costs might well also be collated.

So, assuming the case progresses and the issue gets resolved satisfactorily, how does the RSL learn from the experience? Overall costs to rectify quite often are many times the original cost of getting the issue right in the first place, so its crucial that from each complaint, we analyse, learn and work to tweak wider processes, often with the whole journey in the room, to reduce recurrence.

Sample changes I have seen from working with clients over 20 years around complaints, have been:

Improvements to staff training and experience going forward / mentoring. Building even better relationships with residents improves outcomes for all
Enhancements to initial repairs diagnosis routines and scripting to capture additional information for more complex repairs, reducing costs, minimising follow-up visits
Better communication when repairs span multiple visits, involve pre-inspections, jobs on hold etc
Introduction of before & after photos for repairs, to better monitor operative trade quality, including photos for evidencing no-access carding
Improved presentation of service charges and info on leaseholder billing, introduction of automated module to calculate charges and enhancement of web portal to reduce manual queries and widen transparency
Introduction of targeted estate/scheme inspections/walkabouts based on complaint hotspots for ASB. EG abandoned vehicle/dumping hotspots
Enhancement of specialist and targeted Tenant participation groups, involving residents earlier, to nip specific issues ‘in the bid’ before they become more serious and costly to rectify. Trusting residents to be our remote sensors
Where complaints have initiated change that residents should notice, share it via quarterly newsletters, Facebook pages, twitter or WhatsApp groups. If the RSL has fixed stuff, tell residents, so they know about the changes that are being trialed

At any point in the process, a FOI (Freedom Of Information) request could be made by a complainant OR if the case cannot be amicably resolved, all the details of the case might need to be collated or exported. Where existing solutions may struggle to achieve this, it puts the RSL at a disadvantage. Possibly residents have better access to this information than the landlord, particularly some time after the original incident occurred. An absolute gift for companies that assist residents with Disrepair claims.

Good reporting from the case management system is key. This might include KPIs such as average time taken to resolve, numbers and categories of complaints received, cost to process and cost of exit fix. Outputs must allow cases to be easily monitored by stage, owner, on-time/approaching late/late and current status. Regular automated reminders to staff and management from the solution should be available, to keep cases moving, with easy management insight

I have intentionally covered a lot of ground here, giving some food for thought I would hope for many Social and Council Housing providers. Some clients I have worked with have been using most of these techniques and systems for some time. Others have virtually none, or manage relatively well with manual spreadsheets etc. But that is a rarity.

If your organisation encounters many cases going to local councillors, MPs or the Ombudsman, then clearly there’s a problem. Equally, if complaint cases creates many residents labelled as vexatious or ‘red flagged’ with warnings, it’s more likely that problems lie more with you than your residents. Look again at your internal processes and communication, just small tweaks might make a great deal of difference.

If we at Acutance Consulting can help your organisation with complaint solutions,

please just get in touch, for a friendly chat over a brew & some Hobnobs ☕😋.

Catch the blog monthly archive at
https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/

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Kasabian – Processed Beats.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here