the human measure as the benchmark

Carola Boering is complaints manager at Parteon; Sigi Evers is team manager of the customer information centre. Between them they own the question of how you help thousands of tenants without treating them all the same.

every tenant is different

That sounds obvious until you think about what it means for the set-up. If every tenant is different, you cannot push everyone down the same channel. One calls, another emails, a third walks in. That is not inefficiency to be engineered away, it is the reality you build around.

it goes beyond the front office

Boering points out that customer communication does not stop at the counter or the phone. A tenant who is dealt with well and then hears nothing for two weeks still has a bad experience. The front office is where it starts, not where it ends. As she puts it: “customer communication obviously goes a lot further than the front office alone”.

the basics first

At the time of the conversation Evers is busy getting the basics in place: processes that hold up, a knowledge base where colleagues find the same answer, and the platform underneath. New channels come after that. What is there has to stand up first.

It is a choice you see more often at housing associations that are doing well. Switching on another channel on a shaky foundation does not make it better, only busier.

the benchmark

So where do you set it? Boering answers in a single line.

Not the average waiting time, not the first-time-right percentage. Those numbers help you see where it goes wrong, but they are not the standard. Coaching on conversations, looking at what the data says, and listening to what tenants report back through KWH, the Dutch benchmark for housing associations: that is the work.