From Listening to Improving:
Turning Customer Feedback into Real Change in Social Housing

Most housing providers are already listening to tenants. The harder question is whether that feedback is changing anything visible: fewer repeat contacts, clearer updates, faster recovery, better repairs experiences, stronger board evidence and fewer issues escalating into complaints.

In this recorded webinar, Darren Wake is joined by Chris Elliott, Principal Consultant for Customer Experience at Housemark, to unpack what separates landlords who report tenant feedback from landlords who actually use it to improve services.

Chris brings Housemark’s sector-wide view across hundreds of landlords, alongside practical insight from STAR, TSMs, benchmarking and customer experience work. Darren adds the operational lens from working with housing providers on transactional feedback, service recovery, AI text analysis and real-time action routing.

This is a useful session if your organisation has plenty of feedback data, but still struggles to answer questions like:

• Which issues should we act on first?
• Where are residents telling us confidence is starting to erode?
• How do we move from dashboard reporting to evidence of action?
• Which journeys are creating avoidable contact, complaints or regulatory risk?
• How do we show boards and regulators that resident voice is shaping decisions?

The hidden risk in “fairly satisfied”

One of the strongest parts of the webinar is Chris’s challenge to the way social housing often reads satisfaction results.

When fairly satisfied is bundled together with very satisfied, it can look reassuring. But the discussion explains why that middle ground can hide a serious risk: tenants who are not angry enough to complain, but not confident enough to advocate. They may be tolerating delays, chasing updates, repeating information or accepting poor communication because they no longer expect much better.

For customer insight, complaints, governance and service leads, this is a powerful reframing. “Fairly satisfied” is not a comfortable success measure. It is an early-warning signal.

Why effort may be your most useful predictor

The webinar also makes a strong case for customer effort as one of the most practical indicators housing providers can track.

Tenant effort shows up in the basic moments: waiting on hold, chasing repairs, repeating the same story, decoding unclear updates, or not knowing what happens next. These issues may not always become formal complaints, but they quietly drive frustration, repeat contact and loss of trust.

Chris and Darren explain why reducing effort is often faster and more achievable than launching major transformation work. Clearer communication, more predictable journeys and small operational fixes can quickly improve the resident experience while making life easier for frontline teams too.

From score chasing to service improvement

This session is particularly useful for teams under pressure from TSMs, board reporting, Awaab’s Law, complaints scrutiny and regulatory expectations.

Rather than chasing a headline score, the webinar shows how stronger landlords are using feedback to:

• spot repairs, damp and mould, missed appointment and repeat-contact risks earlier
• identify small moments that make a big difference, such as delay updates, cleanliness, ID badges and repair communication
• route urgent feedback to the teams who can act on it
• create an audit trail showing what happened, what action was taken and what outcome followed
• use benchmarking to learn from high performers, not just check who is below them
• report very satisfied separately so improvement is not hidden inside the combined TSM measure
• connect feedback themes to policy reviews, service design, contractor instructions and board KPIs

What high-performing landlords are doing differently

The webinar closes with a practical look at the capabilities that are becoming more important across the sector:

• Predictive insight to spot repeat repairs, damp and mould indicators, missed appointments and arrears risks before they escalate.
• Real-time sentiment so failed journeys can be picked up today, not months later in an annual survey.
• Personalised communication that keeps residents informed in the channel, language and format that works for them.
• CX-led service design that turns insight into changes to scheduling, triage, scripts, policies and escalation routes.
• Smart automation that reduces routine contact while protecting the human response for vulnerable, distressed or high-risk residents.

If you work in customer insight, CX, housing operations, complaints, governance, performance or regulation, this webinar will help you sharpen the link between resident feedback, operational action and evidence of improvement.

Fill in your details to watch the recording and see how to turn tenant voice into clearer priorities, faster recovery and a stronger improvement story.