When TSM scores become the strategy, improvement slows

The Sector’s Obsession with TSM Scores Is Holding It Back

Transparency Standards have reshaped board conversations across social housing.

They are visible, public and politically sensitive.

In many registered providers, they have become a ‘north star’ customer metric.

You’d expect us, with our 15 year history of helping organisations listen to customer voices, to celebrate this, right?

But when TSM scores become your strategy, customer experience improvement slows down.

The Problem With Perception

TSMs are important.

They provide benchmarking and enable regulatory comparison.

But they are also:

• A sample-based snapshot
• A lagging indicator

They tell you how residents feel about their landlord.

They do not tell you precisely why.

And they certainly don’t tell you what to fix tomorrow morning.

What Happens When TSMs Take Over

We are increasingly seeing landlords become focused on:

• “How do we raise our TSM score?”
• “Which service is dragging perception down?”
• “How do we close the gap to sector average?”

The danger is subtle.

The focus shifts from improving experience to managing perception.

Teams start chasing score uplift rather than addressing underlying operational drivers.

And crucially, transactional feedback, the day-to-day lived experience of residents, becomes secondary.

The Lagging Indicator Trap

TSMs measure sentiment at a point in time.

But what drives that sentiment?

Often:

• A poorly handled repair three months earlier
• An unresolved ASB issue
• A missed appointment
• A slow complaint response
• Inconsistent communication

The real insight lives in the operational data, not just the annual perception survey.

High-maturity organisations understand this distinction clearly.

They focus on leading indicators:

• Transactional satisfaction
• Service recovery effectiveness
• Communication sentiment
• Repeat contact rates
• Complaint escalation risk

When these improve consistently, perception follows.

When the score becomes the goal

TSMs were introduced to increase transparency. They’ve done that.

Boards now see resident perception clearly. Comparisons are public. The regulator is watching.

But once that published score becomes the headline measure of performance, behaviour changes.

Instead of asking, “Why are repairs failing first time?” the conversation becomes, “Why did satisfaction with repairs drop three points?”

That’s not the same discussion.

You start to see time spent reviewing survey methodology. Debating sample sizes. Asking whether incentives are causing skew. Checking whether a dip is statistically significant. Preparing explanations for the board or the Regulator of Social Housing.

Meanwhile, the operational issues that actually drive perception — missed appointments, damp and mould cases going round in circles, contractors not communicating, complaints escalating to Stage 2 — carry on.

They’re harder to fix. They involve procurement, systems and contractor management. They don’t produce a quick uplift before the next reporting cycle.

So attention drifts.

Frontline teams feel pressure when the score dips, even if the root cause sits in asset strategy or legacy stock condition. Managers push for visible improvements. There’s a focus on this quarter’s detractors.

None of this is unreasonable. It’s what happens when a metric becomes high stakes.

But improving a TSM score is not the same as improving housing services.

If a repair is still misdiagnosed, if mould returns six months later, if residents feel they have to complain twice to be heard, the underlying trust problem hasn’t gone away — even if the percentage looks healthier.

TSMs were meant to highlight where services need strengthening.

They weren’t meant to become the service strategy.

A More Balanced Model

The most progressive housing providers are reframing the conversation.

TSMs are the benchmark.

But the real work happens elsewhere.

They don’t look at a low score in isolation. They look at the tenancy.

• What repairs were raised in the last six months?
• Were there repeat visits?
• Did the issue escalate to a complaint?
• Was there ASB involved?
• Has this resident contacted the call centre three times about the same problem?
• Is there a vulnerability flag that changes the context completely?

The score is the starting point.

The real question is:

What has this resident actually experienced?

When you line up the repair history, the complaints record, the contact logs and any indicators of vulnerability, the story becomes clearer. You can see patterns. You can see failure points. You can see where processes break down.

That’s where improvement starts.

The Sector’s Next Evolution

Social housing doesn’t need more surveys.

It needs better follow-through.

Most providers are now collecting perception data properly. The question is what happens next.

The organisations that will pull ahead are the ones who:

• Use TSMs to spot patterns, not defend performance
• Join survey results to repair history, complaint stages and asset data
• Fix repeat failures rather than chasing short-term uplift
• Treat service recovery as part of operations, not PR

Over time, this drives real change.

Fewer repeat repairs. Fewer escalated complaints. Fewer residents who feel they have to shout to be heard.

The score improves — but as a consequence, not a strategy.

From reporting sentiment…

…to fixing the services that create it.