Improving the housing experience

How we designed initiatives to improve the resident experience for Sanctuary Housing.

Context & Objectives

Sanctuary is a housing association and care provider with a portfolio across England and Scotland. Over a four-month engagement, our team at Hellon collaborated on a project aimed at understanding spectrum of resident experiences, conceptualising improvement initiatives and validating these through testing with both residents and staff. This project was spurred by a government white paper outlining statutory requirements for social housing providers to adopt a more customer-centric approach.

Role

I worked in a team with a senior service designer. We collaborated closely with customer experience leads in the client organisation. My role consisted of:

• Conducting a literature review of client material
• Writing interview guides and co-leading interviews with residents
• Assisting in running focus groups with frontline staff and residents
• Creating customer journey maps
• Developing concepts
• Co-writing reports and co-presenting updates to the client

Approach

An overview of the project approach

A. I began by reviewing literature sent by the client and used this to inform the creation of interview guides. I then co-led interviews and focus groups with Sanctuary staff and residents from across the UK.

Conducting a site visit (Left), Interview analysis (Right)

B. I analysed the interviews in Miro and synthesised the insights into a set of customer journey maps and a customer behaviour quadrant. I then presented these to the client and developed the journey maps based on their feedback.

Customer journey map (Left), Customer behavioural quadrant (Right)

C. I supported in planning and facilitating a remote workshop held with strategy and frontline staff. The aim was to generate ideas that responded to opportunities and pain points in the customer journey maps. I then supported in developing the ideas from the workshop into service concepts.

Remote workshop (Left), Example of a service concept (Right)

D. I supported focus groups with residents to test the service concepts. I then used this information to prioritise the concepts and to create three ‘proposed’ customer journey maps.

Validatation methodology (Left), Overview of a proposed customer journey (Right)

E. Finally, I co-wrote the final and interim reports and included recommendations on which concepts to prioritise.

Outputs

The outputs were ‘current’ and ‘proposed’ customer journey maps, a customer behaviour quadrant, interim research reports and a final recommendations report.

Overview of a customer journey map output

Impact

Our project equipped Sanctuary Housing with a suite of initiatives aimed at enhancing the resident experience, aligning with evolving industry requirements outlined in the government white paper.

Reflections

While our efforts focused on resident experience enhancement, structural challenges within the social housing sector remained beyond the project’s scope. Addressing these challenges would necessitate broader systemic considerations, an aspect that warrants attention in future initiatives.

If you are interested in any of my work, feel free to get in touch with me at peter77waters@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.