You're not getting feedback wrong — you're not acting on it

You’ve been running a tenant feedback programme for years. Ten surveys, maybe more — repairs, ASB, customer service, asset moves, all covered. You attend the governance meetings, report the scores to the board, meet the TSM requirements.

And nothing has changed for your tenants.

If that sounds familiar, the problem isn’t effort and it isn’t your team. Most housing feedback programmes were set up to collect and report — acting on what comes back is a different job, and one you can do with the team you’ve already got.

Collecting feedback and acting on it are different jobs

Most feedback programmes in social housing are built to measure satisfaction, not improve it. Years of STAR surveys, TSM reporting and ombudsman scrutiny have made measurement the mandate: run the survey, report the score. The question nobody asks is what happens to a dissatisfied tenant after they submit a survey.

A monitoring programme tells you where you are. Add service recovery and it starts changing where you end up. Without one, you have a monitoring exercise dressed up as a feedback programme: the score goes up and down, nobody knows why, nothing changes.

If the goal is better TSM scores, monitoring alone won’t get you there. Scores improve when tenant experiences improve, and experiences improve when problems get resolved. Neither happens because you have a dashboard.

”Just tracking a number”

A mid-to-large housing association we work with ran ten transactional surveys for years on their previous platform — repairs, ASB complaints, asset moves, customer service. The platform ticking away in the background, and, in their own assessment, no insight that led to any change.

Scores moved up and down across ten surveys and nobody could say what was driving the movement.

The conclusion they eventually reached wasn’t that their scores were bad. It was that having the programme made no difference: they were just tracking a number.

When I asked whether they were doing any service recovery — contacting dissatisfied tenants and resolving the issue — the answer was none at all. Their own estimate was that about five percent of feedback needed a response, and they were responding to zero.

Routing, not headcount

CX teams in housing are not growing. Smaller teams, more regulatory pressure, no budget for headcount — I hear a version of it from every housing client I work with. A team of three running feedback across a sizeable housing association is the norm, not the exception.

For a team that size, tools that add process without removing effort make things worse. A lot of VoC platforms are built for teams of twenty: more analytics views, more survey types, more dashboards — and every one of them needs a person to configure it, interpret it and act on it.

Most feedback doesn’t need a response at all. The portion that does — the tenant who waited six weeks for a repair that was never finished, the complaint that wasn’t resolved first time, the household reporting the same issue again — needs a person to pick up the phone. Three people can act on that portion. What they can’t do is read every response to find it.

This is what labels and alerts are for. A piece of feedback gets tagged on what’s in it — “had to chase multiple times”, “marked resolved but recurring”, “repair completed but still broken” — and the alert goes straight to the colleague who owns that service area. Nobody screens responses by hand. The five percent that needs a response reaches someone who can do something about it.

In onboarding sessions, the labels are what get people excited — more than any dashboard ever does. A label means somebody knows, today, that a tenant needs calling about their damp. And the early call is the cheap one: an issue fixed the first time it’s raised doesn’t turn into a formal complaint or an ombudsman referral.

What a closed loop looks like in practice

Connect Housing started where the organisation above did: a manual, spreadsheet-based feedback system, fewer than 100 responses a month, and insight arriving too slowly to act on. Now feedback comes in real time, tracked by tenant type, neighbourhood and demographic, and volumes are high enough that the results carry confidence rather than caveats. Richard Baggott’s summary: “a great tool that gives real-time, actionable results… the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”

The loop itself is a short workflow — we’ve written a full guide to closing it. Feedback is tagged at the point of collection rather than reviewed manually afterwards. Alerts go to the colleague who can act, not the team that manages the programme. The response is quick and personal. Assignment is tracked, so follow-through is visible, and what you learn feeds back into the service.

Stop paying for data and dashboards

The previous generation of VoC platforms was justified when the alternative was a traditional research agency, and the bar was, “give us a score we can report to the board”.

The organisations that left those platforms describe the same thing: perfectly good data, reports that needed an insight team they didn’t have, and a vendor who could configure anything but couldn’t tell them what to do about a bad month. People are sick of paying a lot of money for dashboards that don’t save anyone any time — I hear that sentence, more or less verbatim, every month.

So apply one test, to your programme and to any platform you’re evaluating — ours included. When a tenant gives you a 2 out of 10 and tells you why, does someone call them? If the answer is no, or “sometimes”, or “it depends”, the loop isn’t closed, and no amount of spreadsheets will close it.

The housing associations getting this right aren’t doing it with more headcount than anyone else in the sector. They set the system up to route feedback to the person who can fix it, and then they let it. That’s a design decision, and it’s available to a team of three.

Ready to close the loop?

If your feedback programme is collecting scores but not driving change, we can help you build the routing and service recovery process that changes that. We work with housing associations at exactly this point.

Talk to us