In this Guide…
Most housing associations have tenant-feedback data sitting in a CX platform and a contractor performance process running in parallel — and have never quite connected the two. Beyond Housing and Connect Housing have. This is what they're doing, why it works, and where a CX leader can start this quarter.
A few months ago, Beyond Housing put a minor-repairs contract out to tender. One of the bidders had the kind of technical service-delivery record that would have won the work in a previous round. They didn’t win. They fell down the rankings because they couldn’t articulate how they’d treat a tenant’s home as a customer experience.
Most housing associations have tenant-feedback data sitting in a CX platform and a contractor performance process running alongside it, and have never connected the two. Beyond Housing and Connect Housing both have: one writes customer experience into its tender scoring, the other can see how every contractor performs through its post-visit surveys. Complaints are rising across the sector, STAIRs arrives in October, and the regulator is more visible than at any point in living memory.
The rest of the sector is going to need to catch up.
Why CX belongs inside procurement
“It’s our house, but it’s the customer’s home.” — Matt Thundercliffe, Beyond Housing
That’s Matt Thundercliffe’s framing, and it’s the whole argument in one sentence.
The asset belongs to the housing association. The home belongs to the tenant. The contractor is working in someone’s kitchen or bathroom, usually while the tenant is in it. SLAs measure whether the repair got done within the target window; they don’t measure whether the engineer knocked, took their boots off, explained what they were doing, or left the place tidy.
And the visit counts for more than the contract assumes. Most contact between a landlord and its tenants is a phone call — 80–85% of transactions at Connect Housing — but a call rarely changes how a tenant feels about their landlord.
A visit does.
Someone in their kitchen fixing the boiler or doing the annual gas check, and mostly someone who doesn’t work directly for the landlord. The CX team’s data is the only structured record of what happens in those moments. If your VoC programme can’t see how contractors behave in tenants’ homes, you’re blind on the part of the service tenants judge you hardest on.
At Beyond Housing, that principle is already shaping procurement. The formal process is still being refined, but tenant feedback has gone into two tenders so far, with a third underway.
Beyond Housing rewrote a tender to make CX scorable
Beyond’s recent minor-repairs tender included formal CX scoring criteria. Bidders had to articulate, in writing and against scored questions, how they’d meet customer-experience expectations inside a tenant’s home — not just hit the technical job. Contractors who would historically have won on technical service delivery alone fell down the rankings.
Matt’s team built the criteria from CX insight already sitting in CustomerSure. What tenants had told them about previous contractor visits — the recurring themes, the specific behaviours that came up again and again — informed what bidders were asked to commit to.
“Somebody that we might have given a contract to in the past, just based off their technical service delivery, falling down the penalty when it comes to adding in the customer experience element of it.” — Matt Thundercliffe, Beyond Housing
This is what verbatim tenant feedback and theme detection are for.
Beyond’s tender criteria are a structured statement of what tenants had already said, repeatedly, about how contractors behave in their homes.
Procurement still ran the process. The CX team simply supplied the evaluation criteria, so the questions on the scorecard reflected what tenants care about.
There’s been a knock-on benefit too. With CX scored in the tender, Beyond found it easier to write CX-related delivery KPIs into the contract itself — KPIs they didn’t have before.
The lighter-touch version: see how every contractor performs
Connect Housing’s post-visit surveys record who delivered the work — in-house teams or contractors — so the CX team can see how each contractor performs in tenants’ homes. Contractor satisfaction isn’t a contractual KPI for them, but the first step is being able to see the data.
The scores only tell you which contractor to look at. The comments are what you can raise with them: a tenant writing that the job felt rushed, or that nobody told them what was happening, is detail you can put in front of a contractor without arguing about it.
None of this needs to be in the contract. A performance conversation runs on what tenants say is happening in their homes, not on what the SLA says. If you’ve been assuming survey data is off-limits because your contracts don’t mention it, the data still documents what’s happening, whether the contract mentions it or not.
Where to start this quarter
You don’t need a procurement overhaul to start treating tenant feedback as contractor-performance data. There are three places a housing CX leader can start in the next ninety days.
1. Add per-contractor segmentation field to your post-job surveys. This is Connect’s whole starting point. If your survey platform lets you segment by who delivered the work, you can see which contractors your tenants rate without changing a single contract.
2. Include a CX-articulation question in your next tender evaluation. Make bidders show their working on tenant experience inside the home, and give it a real weighting on the scorecard. You don’t need Matt’s full criteria set on the first attempt. Even one well-designed question — “describe how your engineers will treat the tenant experience inside the property” — shifts the conversation, and shifts who scores well.
3. Bring survey verbatims to your contractor PI meetings. The score is only the headline; the verbatim is the evidence, and it doesn’t need to be in the contract to count. Pick the three most representative verbatims from the last quarter for each contractor and bring them to the meeting.
Procurement and CX usually sit in different parts of the building, and connecting them isn’t anyone’s job. But it’s easy to start. If there’s a contractor review in your diary this quarter, bring the verbatims. If there isn’t, add the segmentation field to your post-job surveys — one field on a survey you already send, and it’s where Connect started.
Extend your VoC programme into the rooms where service actually happens.
If you're working out how to bring tenant feedback into procurement decisions and contractor reviews — like Beyond Housing and Connect Housing have — we'd be glad to compare notes on what's working in the sector and what's realistic in your first quarter.
Darren Wake
Darren Wake leads Customer Success at CustomerSure, where he helps clients act on feedback in ways that improve retention, increase revenue, and reduce customer effort. With a background in marketing, research, and experience design, he’s worked with teams across sectors to align internal processes with what matters most to customers. Known for his practical, plain-speaking approach, Darren helps organisations keep things simple, focus on the essentials, and deliver measurable improvements.
