How to use tenant satisfaction measures to strengthen your financial viability

The notion that achieving better TSM results must entail higher costs is flawed, agrees Shyam Radia, a director at Newton. Clients have told him they need more housing officers, more repairs operatives or more staff in their call centres, he says, but the reality is often simpler than that.

“When we talk to residents, there are four key focus areas people are worried about,” Mr Radia says.

“They want to be able to get in touch with you easily, they want things resolved more quickly, they want to be kept up to date with what’s going on with their issues – and then they want their issues resolved.”

Once an issue is resolved, he adds, people are generally happy with the fix. “So it’s really the first three areas that are driving tenant satisfaction scores.”

Achieving high scores depends on a well-functioning organisation, from frontline to back office. “Are [your back office staff] enabling your [customer-facing] teams to do the right things? And do you have the right operator model and business foundations?

“Because where we’re seeing that not in place, that’s impacting your customer service, that’s impacting your ability to pick the phone up quickly or do a repair within 28 days.”

At 35,000-home landlord Onward Homes, TSM data has driven a hefty – and business-positive – change, says Sandy Livingstone, the association’s executive director of growth. The TSM results revealed that tenants weren’t happy with Onward’s outsourced repairs service, Mr Livingstone says. “We fundamentally changed it and brought it in house, and already through the investment we’ve made, customer satisfaction is up, performance is a lot stronger, and actually it’s less expensive because we’re controlling [the service], and the culture is a lot better.”

As a reflection of an organisation’s overall performance, the TSMs are becoming the “frontline of financial resilience”, says David Ripley, chief operating officer at 40,000-home Stonewater.

These days, he explains, conversations with lenders are about the health of the organisation as a whole: “Are we a safe pair of hands, not just financially, but also operationally? Are we doing the right things to keep the business going in the way that it needs to go?”

Many of the outcomes measured by the TSMs are a reflection of how well a provider functions as a whole.

“A lot of it leads back to culture,” Mr Ripley says, “and whether we are reacting or being proactive [in how] we deliver our services. So a lot of the data that we’re using from the TSMs, we’re matching together with other data within the organisation to make sure that we’re getting that balance right.”

For this reason, TSM results are becoming of essential importance to investors and lenders, says Mr Farnsworth from L&Q.

“They recognise that TSMs are a fundamental indication of how well run a business is. And if you’re a lender or an investor in a business, you want to get your loan repaid at some point in the future. You want to make sure you get your interest payment. But fundamentally, you want to know that that business is sound and is well run.”

It is a similar story where housebuilding is concerned, says Caroline Moore, chief financial officer at 55,000-home Abri, as TSMs are becoming an increasingly valued source of information for external stakeholders.

“What we see with development is that developers, joint venture partners, local authorities and Homes England all absolutely want to see our TSM results,” Ms Moore says.

“It puts us in a better place for development opportunities and we can be more competitive with a better TSM score.”

Several panellists mentioned the value of TSM data in helping them to target their resources more efficiently to those who need them most – particularly with regard to geography. Jahedur Rahman is director of housing at Haringey Council, which manages around 20,000 homes in north London. He describes Haringey as a borough of two halves: “You’ve got the really affluent area, and then you’ve got east of the borough, where you’ve got high levels of deprivation, low education attainment levels and a higher level of anti-social behaviour.”

The TSM data shows decisively that tenant satisfaction is not purely based on the quality of service. Geography plays a big role, and the council has begun to use that insight to inform its interventions.

“The wider approach for housing, certainly in the east of the borough, is what more can we do beyond housing,” he says. “Are there spaces where we can go in and work with communities to improve employment and education levels? Because that’s clearly impacting how they view the council as a landlord.”

This type of insight, derived from an analysis of TSM results, has been of use to housing association Abri, too. Its properties are in “distinct concentrations” around the South of England, and the housing association collates its TSM data on a regional basis.

“We know in London that people are, in general, less satisfied than [other residents] the further you get away from London,” Ms Moore says. “But is it the way we’re structuring our service? Is it our colleagues? Is it the legacy investment in stock that has or hasn’t taken place? Having that body of evidence is proving really good in terms of how we determine our regional investment strategy.

“We are launching a new corporate strategy in a couple of months’ time, and it’s based on really solid regional investment plans that are genuinely different for each region.”

From the point of view of the regulator – represented at this roundtable by Andy Singleton, assistant director of regulatory engagement at the RSH – this deployment of TSM data by landlords is a fundamental feature of the new regulatory regime. 

“We get to see the big picture, how organisations compare to each other,” Mr Singleton says.