Digital Evolution In The Housing Sector

With the after effects of coronavirus not yet known, many companies across sectors are accelerating their digital transformation plans to meet customer demands. Digital services have proved invaluable during lockdown, as a secure, convenient way for people to stay connected, as well as undertake work and personal commitments.

As we adjust to a different way of life and work in general, it’s important to reflect, learn and adapt our priorities, to meet customer demands whilst factoring in social isolation – particularly in the social and independent living housing sector.

So what are the housing sector challenges in moving to digital?

Here are the key things that present barriers to achieving digital excellence:

• Data & insight - it’s very easy to be data rich, yet insight poor – a lack of understanding about customer behaviour and preference is like stabbing in the dark.
• Customer centricity – allowing for technology to drive the agenda, rather than the customer, is never a good approach and won’t be well received.
• Cloud technology – legacy on-premise solutions are rigid and limiting, so many are migrating to cloud, but some companies are nervous about the move and are opting for co-location storage.
• Connectivity in the home – we can put the best technology in our schemes and homes, but we need to ensure residents have a strong, robust internet broadband services to support it. 
• Digital skills – the pace of change to digital can be all consuming, but projects often forget to conduct thorough and comprehensive training and upskilling of new tools and technology for key users. Without this there will be a lack of adoption and a perception that the tools and technology launched have been unsuccessful.
• Communication & engagement – forgetting to take colleagues and customers on the journey with you. This can hinder their understanding and acceptance of why change is necessary.

One final area that is slightly more unique to the housing sector is catering for current and future generations. In the Independent Living market, there is a larger cohort of customers that are naturally less ‘tech savvy’ and receptive to change. There is of course nothing wrong with this, but it does mean we need to strike a balance between traditional services for those less likely to engage digitally, whilst also attempting to appeal to younger and future residents. There is also a risk of overwhelming your customers with what you offer digitally, as the Telecare, mHeath and TEC market is buoyant with fresh tech.

Linked to the data, insight and customer centricity above – don’t assume you know what residents want without asking them first.

Here is some further insight for consideration:

DATA & INSIGHT:

Whether it’s the strategy, quality, storing and translation of data into meaningful insight and action, data is often seen as the poor relation – yet it is VITAL to any future success in digital excellence.

"Without data you’re just another person with an opinion" – W. Edwards Deming

With new technology constantly coming on the market, it’s equally important to align data to help build a 360 picture and understanding of residents, as well as meeting GDPR rules. For example, rolling out webchat, bots, social media channels and AI as an omni-channel service is pretty normal these days, but they all operate on different platforms and have their own data funnels. The challenge for any organisation is to figure out a way to aggregate these data channels and optimise in a CRM solution.

Here are some things we’ll be considering at Johnnie Johnson Housing, which is worth assessing yourself:

Start off by asking your business:

• Where are our customer touch-points?
• What do we want to know about our customer?
• What would we do with the insight?
• How often do we need the data?
• Who will collect and translate the information?

1. Work backward to then determine what data points you need to answer these questions.
2. Look at your existing data source and perform a gap analysis.
3. Cleanse your data to assess the quality of the information you have.
4. If you capture data manually, you may need to consider doing some upskilling to improve the quality of data you collect.
5. Define how often your data source needs updating and how you could automate the process of updating or set reminders for colleagues who are speaking with your customers on a daily basis.
6. Work with key stakeholders to understand what they want and need to know.
7. Reach out to experts in the field, across industries, to explore the art of the possible and what solutions are available to address your needs.
8. Ensure you have the right people involved in selecting a preferred data solution – assessing feasibility, risk, security, hosting and customisation.

Considering these points will allow you to define a strategy which your business can support and stand behind.

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY:

Customer demands and expectations change constantly – particularly in the digital space. With billions invested in new heath and care technology, it’s very easy to go on a shopping spree and buy all sorts of tools that you believe your customer wants. However, buying a solution off the shelf and retrospectivity shoe-horning your customer offer into it, is probably the worst thing you can do and the biggest error I’ve witnessed in projects.

“Bottom line, having a customer-centric culture is more than just a good thing – it’s become a matter of survival.” – Jim Marous

All problems or ideas should start from a customer’s viewpoint, followed by a set of business requirements or user-stories, which then help define a scope for whatever solution you need to build or procure.

Here are some important steps to move to a more customer centric change agenda:

1. Use your data to build up a picture of your customer persona – there may be several to consider.
2. Validate your personas with experts within your business and ideally with some of your customers.
3. Work with your business experts to map out your current and future customer journeys, before validating them.
4. Define a set of theories/hypotheses that you may want to test with your customers.
5. Work with a Business Analyst to build out your user-stories – these are essentially requirements, but from a user perspective.
6. Sketch, design and prototype your products and services, whilst testing and validating with end-users.
7. When your solution is developed and built, make sure you test it with your colleagues and ideal some customers.

CLOUD TECHNOLOGY:

Another challenging area is IT storage, connectivity and security. Opening up new technology and promoting remote and flexible working for colleague’s means we need to move our IT foundations to utilise the cloud. This takes away so many limitations with on-premise storage, as well as access and connectivity issues.

Moving to cloud based technology not only streamlines your IT architecture, but it will open up all sorts of possibilities when exploring new digital products and services for customers. Cloud technology naturally presents concern around security, but there are many tried and tested solutions available to help you keep your business and customers safe.

Think about:

1. What server storage you use today.
2. Define whether you can move to full virtual IT or require co-location (cloud and on-premise).
3. Recruit an IT Architect to help you map out your current network and what you want it to look like in the future.
4. Look at what 3rd party technology you use and whether they require physical storage and/or offer cloud services.
5. Move your office applications to cloud – Office365 or Google Drive offer this by default.
6. Assess what file storage you have and what you need – look to utilise tools such as DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive and/or Sharepoint and ask your colleagues to start archiving what they don’t need to migrate.

DIGITAL SKILLS:

Getting the data and IT infrastructure right is important, but another area that presents barriers is developing the necessary digital skills within our operational teams.

“The only thing worse than training employees and losing them, is to not train and keep them.” – Henry Ford

As humans, we don’t typically like or adapt to change very well, but the reality is, is that we need to keep up to the same fast pace of change with technology and consumer expectations. Whether it’s upskilling in cloud applications, video conferencing or developing call scripts to handle online queries, all colleagues need to get on-board to help your business survive and thrive.

Start to explore:

1. What your workforce skill gaps are – conduct a skills assessment.
2. Ensure people are open and transparent about their level of capability – it’s not an exercise to punish or expose weakness in people.
3. Look at what you can cross-skill by asking more experienced colleagues to support those with less knowledge.
4. Where you have a consistent skill gap across the workforce, consider whether an expert could come in and train colleagues, or whether you have training available in your online learning services.
5. Create ‘digital champions’ who can upskill your colleagues and champion the digital message.
6. Consider utilising these champions to provide resident support with digital services.
7. Look to conduct annual skill assessments with your colleagues to continually assess their needs.

COMMUNICATION & ENGAGEMENT:

The final element to getting things right is communication – both internally with colleagues and externally with customers and clients. Thankfully we do this really well at Johnnie Johnson, but so many companies forget to take their people and customers with them.

I often refer to an analogy of operational experts standing at the end of a conveyor belt with parcels flying out of a noisy, battered machine. They don’t know when the products are coming, nor what is in the box, but they are expected to take it and own it. This style of approach will never work if you’re serious about transforming your organisation.

Similarly, if we don’t invest in our data to understand who our customers are and what they want; nor speak to them and offer them the chance to critique and provide feedback, then how do we know they’ll like what they’re given?

Build the following into your digital transformation plans and projects:

1. Be open and transparent about why change is needed and the benefits it will bring to customers, colleagues and the business.
2. Invite representatives from the business to get involve from day 1 – they are usually the eyes and ears of your customer.
3. Validate your designs with end users – whether these are sketches, wireframes, prototypes or glossy visual concepts.
4. Keep colleagues and customers regularly updated through engaging content – emails, videos, podcasts etc. Think about setting us a virtual review panel to support the engagement.
5. Invite them to participate in user acceptance testing (UAT).
6. Ask them how they would like the product/service to be delivered.

In summary, here is a recap of what success in digital excellence:

• Data & insight - understand who your customer is and what they want and expect from you.
• Customer centricity – design with the customer in mind – not the technology.
• Cloud technology – legacy on-premise solutions are rigid and limited – move to cloud to open up all sorts of possibilities.
• Digital skills – invest in the skills and capabilities within your workforce, as your customers will need help and support adopting new products and services, and they’ll expect your business to be the experts.
• Communication & engagement – take your colleagues and customers on the journey with you. Let them co-design and build solutions that they are proud of and happy to use.