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Service recovery only works when it’s built into delivery. This article explains why alerts and inboxes aren’t enough… And how to design recovery as a core process.
Service Recovery in Social Housing Is Broken - And It’s Not Because People Don’t Care
Across the social housing sector, there is no shortage of commitment.
Colleagues care deeply. Teams work under pressure. Leaders want to reduce complaints, improve satisfaction and do the right thing for residents.
And yet, service recovery continues to fail.
Not because housing providers don’t want to recover service.
But because structurally, they haven’t designed for it.
The Illusion of Service Recovery
Most organisations can point to a process:
- Feedback surveys go out.
- Dissatisfaction is flagged.
- Alerts are sent.
- Someone is notified.
On paper, service recovery exists.
In practice, it often operates as an overlay.
An inbox alert. A “when there’s time” activity.
And that’s the fundamental flaw.
Anything that isn’t core or structural often doesn’t get done. Especially in operational environments already stretched by demand, compliance pressure and regulatory scrutiny.
Why Good Intentions Don’t Scale
In many housing providers, dissatisfaction alerts are routed to managers or directors, sometimes with the best of intentions:
“I want visibility of everything.”
But visibility doesn’t translate to outcomes.
When senior leaders become the triage system for dissatisfied tenants, one outcome is certain: They become a bottleneck.
The result?
Issues escalate. Complaints increase. Scrutiny intensifies.
And the board ask: “Why aren’t complaints falling?”
The Real Cost of Missed Recovery
Every missed service recovery opportunity has consequences:
- Escalation to Stage 1 or Stage 2 complaints
- Increased cost-to-serve
- Regulatory exposure
- Reputational risk
- Leadership distracted by firefighting
What makes this particularly frustrating is that in many cases, dissatisfaction was visible weeks earlier in survey feedback.
The signal was there, but the structure to handle it wasn’t.
Service Recovery Is Not a Cultural Problem. It’s a Design Problem.
We often hear:
“We need more accountability.”
Or:
“Teams need to take ownership.”
Usually what that really means is this:
Residents are telling us something’s wrong, but nothing changes unless someone pushes it.
If service recovery sits outside day-to-day operations, it will always be inconsistent. It relies on goodwill. Or memory. Or someone spotting an email.
That’s not sustainable in a housing organisation dealing with thousands of repairs, complaints and contacts every month.
The providers who get this right don’t treat recovery as an add-on.
If a resident reports damp, it links to the repair history. If a survey flags dissatisfaction, it triggers a task, not a discussion. If a complaint escalates, the underlying service failure is reviewed, not just the wording of the response.
Sentiment is visible to the people actually delivering the service. Recovery is tracked like any other operational activity. Ownership sits with the team responsible for fixing the issue, not the team writing the reply.
Not another inbox. Not a spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays.
Just part of how the service runs.
What This Means for Housing Leaders
Reducing complaints isn’t about pushing volumes down.
It’s about stopping the same problems from being created in the first place.
Most formal complaints don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re usually the second or third signal. A low survey score that wasn’t followed up. A repair that didn’t fix the issue. A resident who called twice before anyone took ownership.
By the time it reaches Stage 1, frustration has been building for weeks.
So the better question for boards isn’t “How many complaints did we receive?”
It’s:
How quickly do we act when someone signals dissatisfaction?
How many escalated complaints were predictable if we’d joined the dots?
Are repeat failures visible in our data — and who is accountable for fixing them?
If you can’t answer those confidently, the issue isn’t complaint handling.
It’s service design.
The Shift the Sector Needs
The sector is already collecting plenty of feedback.
That isn’t the gap anymore.
The gap is what happens after a low score, or a survey comment about damp, or a complaint that’s been open too long.
In too many organisations, recovery is still reactive. A detractor comes in. Someone calls them. The case is closed. Everyone moves on.
The underlying issue — repeat repairs, poor diagnosis, unclear communication — stays in place.
Embedding recovery means building it into how services run. Repairs teams see the feedback. Asset teams see the patterns. Complaint themes feed into service reviews. Repeat failures get fixed, not apologised for.
When that happens, you don’t just get fewer detractors next quarter.
You get fewer repeat contacts. Fewer escalations. Less firefighting. And less pressure on frontline teams.
The sector doesn’t need another survey programme.
It needs services designed so the same problems don’t keep coming back.
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.
