Customer Voice Strategy

The overall purpose of our revised Customer Voice strategy and action plan is to clearly set out a framework for ensuring the customer voice is heard across the business. It is part of every colleagues’ role to hear the customer voice to sharp how we deliver services and ultimately improve the customer experience.

In June 2023 our approach to customer voice was audited and recommendations from that audit have been incorporated into the aims and objectives of this strategy. 

The strategy will only succeed with everyone’s buy in. Hearing to understand the customer voice is not the job of the Customer Experience team in isolation. There must be a business wide willingness and commitment to listen to understand the customer to truly hear the customer voice, and incorporate it, in all our decision making. 

Understanding, and acting on, our customer voice leads to a wealth of positive benefits including a more inclusive service, improved customer satisfaction (CSAT), a reduction in complaints, value for money and increased engagement through increased trust. The consumer standards mean identifying the needs and expectations of our customers to influence the overall customer experience is more important than ever. 

Designing and aligning services to make sure these expectations are met consistently will deliver value to the customer, and value for the organisation. 

This strategy aims to bridge the gap between transactional listen and understanding, enabling our customers to be being truly heard so the impact of their voice is felt across the business.

• To embed a culture of hearing the customer voice throughout the business
• To understand our customers and ensure we tailor our services to meet their needs
• To ensure the customer voice is used to influence service delivery
• To demonstrate the impact the customer voice has had on service delivery and decision making 
• To better understand our customer profile and preferred ways to engage and influence • To offer an inclusive menu of engagement opportunities 
• To increase collaboration between customers and colleagues 
• To ensure our regulatory requirements under the transparency, influence and accountability standard are met
• To ensure resident focus as per the NHF Code of Governance 
• To provide opportunities to strengthen customer scrutiny and increase board assurance
• To create a clear framework for customer engagement and feedback
• To be accountable to our customers

In order to deliver our aims and objectives we felt it was important will be met by way of the following 4 key principles, and associated customer voice action plan.

Principle 1 – Hearing to Influence 

One Manchester must embed a culture of not only listening to, but hearing and understanding, our customers. We must understand our diverse communities and customer base to deliver on what is important to our customers. We must understand our customer profile in order to tailor our services to customer need, including customers that have not engaged with us previously.

What the customer voice is telling us 

• At least 34% of our customers may need support to access our services
• 63% of our customers feel we listen to their views 

Data and insight plays a vital role in knowing who our customers are, and is gained from a variety of sources, but truly understanding our customers goes beyond transactional information sharing and passive listening. 

It is vital that we understand what the customer voice is telling us and that we use this knowledge to take appropriate action, influence our service delivery, influence our decision making, and provide positive outcomes to our customers. 

The Customer Voice Strategy must align with the EDI Strategy, Reasonable Adjustment policy, and Inclusive access strategy in ensuring One Manchester holds accurate information about our customers and subsequently uses that information to tailor the way we deliver services, increase satisfaction, and promote engagement with our diverse customers. 

The customer voice must be heard across the business, at all levels, including at board. Currently the chair of or Customer Scrutiny Panel (CSP) sits on our Customers and Communities Committee. The CSP scrutinize our performance from a resident perspective and influence decision making at a strategic level. 

In an increasingly digital world we must ensure that digitally excluded customers are given a voice. Our Tenancy experience visit data is important in mapping areas where customers may be digitally excluded and we will use this insight to ensure we are not excluding customers further by not offering additional, more appropriate, methods of engagement. We understand that there will always be a place for in person engagement.

In addition to direct customer consultation we will also hear the voice of the customer via perception surveys, complaints, MPs and Councillors, and customer journey mapping. 

Principle 2 – Choice 

We serve a diverse customer base and understand that engagement is not a one size fits all. We have consulted with customers around engagement and continue to better understand our customer profile and communication preferences so we can tailor our engagement options around what our customers want, and remove barriers to engagement. 

What the customer voice is telling us 

• Circa 70% of customers want to engage with us online
• Being easy to deal with was consistently mentioned by customers completing TSM surveys in 23/24 

We know from customer insight that One Manchester being easy to deal with is very important to our customers. As such, we need to ensure that engaging with us is as easy as possible. We recognise that we must create the right opportunities and environments for customers to feel comfortable to contribute their views. 

We must provide opportunities for customers to engage with us around topics they want to discuss. We must also use the perception surveys and complaints’ themes to keep up to date on the customer voice to ensure we are engaging with customers on any emerging issues and themes, creating a customer led agenda. 

The majority of customers consulted have told us they would prefer to provide feedback online and as such we must embrace this type of engagement. Digital consultation has advantages in that it removes barriers around transport, time restraints, and mobility issues but we remain conscious of digitally excluded customers. 

Principle 3 – Co-Creation 

We will pro-actively work with our customers to shape services using their valued knowledge and experience. Co-creation encourages transparency, positive collaboration, and customer empowerment. 

What the customer voice is telling us 

• Repairs is the area of the business most customers want to talk to us about
• Negative sentiment around listening to customers was a consistent theme in the TSM surveys 

Co-creation with our customers means we are providing services in a way that meets customer need and ensures we focus on what would be most impactful for our customers and being genuinely customer centric by encouraging collaboration between customers and colleagues throughout the business. Co-creation also allows us to meet our regulatory requirements under the Transparency, Influence, and Accountability consumer standard and give board assurance that customers are influencing our decision making. 

Co-creation demonstrates our commitment to going beyond transactional listening to genuinely deliver the services that our customers want. It is important that to successfully co-create that customers are respected as equal partners and their views are valued and lead to customer centric solutions and design. 

Ultimately co-creation has a business benefit by encouraging engagement and co-operation and increasing trust through all stages of a project from the very beginning up to implementation and monitoring success as we can call upon our customers knowledge and lived experience to ensure that any changes we have made have had a positive impact. 

Principle 4 – Communication 

Honest communication drives trust. We will keep open lines of communication with customers by obtaining regular insight and feedback from multiple channels. We will then communicate to customers how their voices have been heard and what we have done as a result of their feedback.

What the customer voice is telling us 

• 70% of customers feel they are kept informed
• Customers who have engaged with us previously have not always had any follow up
• We have not pro-actively engaged with customers who have indicated via surveys, consultation, or tenancy experience visits they are open to engaging with us

Where One Manchester have made changes to service delivery as a result of customer influence we will communicate this to our customers by way of a bi-annual “You Said, We Did” although to fully close the feedback loop we also want to capture the “You Feel” i.e. what has been the impact of the change. By doing this we evidence we have moved from passive listening to active understanding and action taking. We are also able to build trust and maintain engagement.

Communication must be open and honest. As such we must embrace positive challenge from customers and engage with their lived experience. Dismissing customers and their experiences will not build the positive relationships we need. 

We are committed to keeping customers informed on how we are performing and have recently published our TSM and annual complaints data on the website. Depending on what customer feedback tells us will shape what future performance information we share, and also how we share it.

We are committed to sharing this information so customers can scrutinize our performance and hold us accountable. 

We will continue to share the customer voice with teams and colleagues across the business by way of customer journey maps, complaints learning and sentiment analysis to increase understanding and accountability at all levels. 

We will communicate with board on the customer voice by way of quarterly updates on all customer activity across the business. To allow us to effectively capture and feed back on how we have used the customer voice to shape services it is vital that all colleagues consistently hear, act on, and record the impact that customers have made.

The success of the Customer Voice strategy will be measured in a variety of ways including: 

• TSM’s
• Complaints and escalations
• Number of engaged customers
• Board assurance
• C1 or C2 rating by the RSH
• Co-created services and solutions

The key risk to this strategy, as with the Customer Experience strategy, is that it is seen as the responsibility of one team in the business rather than as a key part of everyone’s role. Embedding these 4 principes requires a culture change and buy in. Without this buy in there is a risk that we “tick a box” with engagement rather than providing inclusive opportunities and giving the customer voice the priority it needs.

A detialed action plan has been developed and appended to this strategy.