Our recent work showed the power of video and personas for social housing to drive understanding and change.

Nothing creates change faster than a better understanding of customers’ needs and experiences.  By combining personas, video of qualitative research and customer journey mapping we helped GreenSquare staff from the front line to the senior leadership team gain a deep understanding of customer’s experiences and needs.

It has united and galvanised the organisation behind a targeted series of changes that will meet customers’ needs that were previously hidden.

GreenSquare Group was created by the merger of three housing associations to make it one of the largest social housing organisations across the South West.

Customers and staff experienced significant upheaval.  So, following extensive restructuring the business explored how it could improve customer satisfaction levels.  They realised they needed to better understand the experiences and priorities of different types of customers so that they could focus on improving the things that mattered most.

Personas

Rather than looking at customer segments we helped them understand the value of Personas.  Personas group customers by characteristics such as need and emotions.  They are a very powerful way for staff to better understanding their customers. More examples here.

We worked with a cross-function group of front-line staff and identified the four most important Personas. We got the group to describe what an individual from each group might be like and what they thought drove their behaviour.

Using data and telephone screening we recruited customers from each persona and conducted in depth, qualitative research.   This allowed us to add genuine insight to the personas and to dispel some of the myths staff had about their customers.  The research also explored customers’ daily experiences of every aspect of their relationship with GreenSquare.

Video

We filmed the research and produced a 5-minute video highlight of the key customer sentiments.  Ultimately this proved critical in helping the project team to gain support for their findings.

We took this powerful insight into Customer Journey Mapping workshops.  It allowed the team to deal with the reality of customers’ experiences as they built ‘As Is’ journey maps. It also shaped their thinking about the most important changes to customer experience that GreenSquare could make.

Some of the surprises for GreenSquare included:

• Many personas do not expect services, including repairs, to be delivered more quickly.
• The biggest impact to customer satisfaction will come from a simple change to process and behaviour that is cheap to implement.
• With the right communication and support key personas will happily take more responsibility (including financial) for their home.

We helped the cross-functional team to prioritise the changes and then presented our findings to the senior management team.    This was a very impactful session and the video really bought home the project findings.  The change plan is now being implemented with our help.  Read more about using research to drive change here.

“I can thoroughly recommend Customer Journey Consultancy. They know their stuff, have managed the project and our teams really well and helped us produce a plan that is ambitious but achievable. It has given us exactly the focus and impetus we’d hoped for.”

Julianne Britton, Head of Customer Services

GreenSquare Group

Read the full testimonial here.