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From living room to boardroom: how we’ve improved our customer influence offer
Our new customer involvement framework places the customer voice at the heart of our strategy and service delivery, writes Craig Taylor, director of customer operations at Amplius
Craig Taylor is director of housing services at the Longhurst Group
Our new customer involvement framework places the customer voice at the heart of our strategy and service delivery, writes Craig Taylor, director of customer operations at Amplius #UKhousingWe 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 the merger that created Amplius, my team has done a great deal 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 new framework places the customer voice at the heart of 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 actively involved they want to be.
“It was clear that our customers have busy lives, meaning they’re often only able to get involved at a particular level or at a time that suits them”
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, and how their voice influences everything that we do.
From this work, it was clear that our customers have busy lives, meaning they’re often 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 different levels of involvement.
We’ve also created a customer influence panel, which holds us to account in the delivery of our two-year action plan, and reports directly to our customer experience committee, which in turn reports to our board. This means our customers can contribute to our customer experience committee and to our board, demonstrating how they always have a voice, from living room to boardroom.
Recognising the importance of influence and engagement at a local level, we have three regional customer panels in different areas of our geography, to ensure local issues are prioritised. The regional panels report directly to the centralised 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% 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.
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.
“By ensuring our customers’ fingerprints are visible in shaping all our work, we’re delivering services that our customers have told us they want and need“
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 work, 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 cycle, we’ve developed a feedback loop where our customers are informed through a range of different media what we’ve done and what impact their voices have had.
Since the framework’s implementation in May, we’ve seen overall customer satisfaction increase to 80%, up from 76% prior. Complaints have dropped by 55% and stage two escalations have reduced by 24%. These figures demonstrate that the impact our customers are having on our services is overwhelmingly positive, and we can’t wait to take this further.
Craig Taylor, director of customer operations, Amplius
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