Turning up the volume on the customer voice

Honeycomb Group's Customer Voice Specialist, Laura Jackson, has shared more about how we're keeping customers at the heart of everything we do through our new neighbourhood model and customer-informed Corporate Plan. Click here to read the full comment piece on Inside Housing.

As an organisation, the customer voice is at the centre of everything we do. While we’re a 3,000-home social landlord, we also provide support and accommodation to those who have experienced homelessness and domestic abuse.

With specialist services like these, lived experience is hugely important as we shape and develop both new and existing projects. We really value that unique insight.

It’s an exciting time for us as an organisation, as we recently launched our new corporate plan: Thriving Futures. The strategy will shape our direction for the next five years and has been informed by our customers throughout.

Over 450 customers contributed to the content of the plan. They shared their priorities and where they’d like us to focus over the next five years.

Laura Jackson

Our housing customers wanted it to be easier to get in touch with us and they also wanted support with things like employability, financial stability, health and well-being, and developing their support networks. For us, this meant helping them to thrive.

One of the ways we have started to make these changes is through our new neighbourhood model. It’s a reshaping of our approach, and actually how I came to join the organisation. My role was created as part of this recommitment to the customer voice, and I’m now working alongside group teams to make sure that it’s both championed and embedded into all of our services.

Born and raised in Staffordshire, I know the challenges local people face. Since joining Honeycomb in June, I can already see how my experience and education in the social welfare sector is helping to shape and support the group’s customer involvement ambitions.

With residents telling us that they wanted it to be easier to get in touch with us, as well as being able to see more staff across schemes and communities, we decided to reconfigure our patches.

We now have three key patches across our communities, each with multiple neighbourhood officers – nine in total – who provide support on a wide range of topics, such as anti-social behaviour, lettings and shared ownership.

This is amazing news, because it means more staff will be available to talk to customers and support them with anything that relates to their housing journey. It also provides more opportunities for colleagues to visit homes and schemes through events, like our popular coffee mornings.

We also wanted to make it easier for customers to speak to us. We shifted from a typical call centre, fully head office-based approach and have launched three new customer hubs across each patch (essentially a mini-version of our central customer services team).

Here, a team of customer advisors and neighbourhood officers are on hand to provide support, both day to day and during regular drop-in sessions throughout the week.

As we work to deliver on our new strategic vision, it’s now about collaboration: with each other, with local partners, but most importantly, with our customers. We want our services to work for them and ensure that our residents not only live in their homes, but thrive.

With our support, we want them to access opportunities that can help them achieve their aspirations and goals that we know they are capable of reaching.

We’re transforming the way we operate and the impact we are able to have in our region, and it’s all thanks to those who use and know our services best.