Often, creating genuine, impactful change involves disrupting the established norms to stimulate new thinking. One way that we approach designing the bespoke change solutions that spark brilliance is to fuse our experience with our clients’ knowledge, expertise and aspirations to come up with something truly unconventional and exciting.
When we were asked in 2023 by Yorkshire Housing to help them achieve a Big, Hairy Audacious Goal, we did just that, aiming to transform how they saw their social housing tenants, and become customer-obsessed.
With new laws coming into force in 2025 under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 plus some high-profile individuals like Kwajo Tweneboa calling for change, there was a recognised need for housing associations to address some major issues. Yorkshire Housing wanted to lead the way in changing the story, disrupting the industry and making sure everyone started seeing their tenants both as customers, and as real people.
What does customer-obsession mean?
A customer-obsessed organisation prioritises the customers’ needs and experience in every business goal. They’re focussed on delighting their customers, and continuously improving their experience, making them more loyal to their brand.
Commonly, this means:
- Making it quick and easy to get help – from real people
- Being obsessed with every detail of the customer’s journey
- Getting out from behind a desk or a keyboard to be at the front line of customer interactions
- Creating real relationships with customers
- Being driven by customer feedback to constantly improve
- Using internal communications to constantly reinforce a customer-obsessed culture
- Aligning every department behind the need for excellence in customer experience – not just a customer service team
Seeing every customer as a real person with individual needs
Owning and managing around 20,000 homes across the region, Yorkshire Housing are dedicated to making it possible for people to have a place they’re proud to call home.
Melissa, our AKD team lead, says, though, “they recognised that there’s often a ‘them and us’ view of social housing tenants. That was one of the first things we needed to change. Even the idea of becoming customer-obsessed felt like a big step at first, but, as Yorkshire Housing proudly says, ‘we’re all Yorkshire’, and the client leadership was determined, and gave us the go-ahead to rip up the rule book.”
Taking inspiration from elsewhere
It’s easy to stay so focussed on your own issues that you get blinded to possibility, so we like to look beyond the obvious, and challenge people to think differently. When working with leaders we apply our disruptive learning model to their development. Part of our ethos is “it’s not in the classroom”. Some of the most profound learning comes from uncomfortable experiences. In this case we wanted Senior Leaders to experience what it felt like to be Yorkshire Housing customer. We set a number of challenges, one of them being to stay in a “void” property and be a customer for 1-2 days and spend time talking with other customers to understand their experiences.
Others were challenged to get out from behind their keyboards at the call centre and talk face-to-face with customers.
This eye-opening experience revealed the real-life stories behind some of the association’s tenants, giving their team’s the impetus to shake up some of their preconceptions.
As Melissa says, “people started to realise the reality of moving into social housing. How do you top up the gas and electricity meters in the middle of the night? How do you get help if you haven’t any phone credit? How does it feel if you’ve experienced abuse? What do you do if English isn’t your first language and you struggle with it? It was also revealing for some people to have their stereotypes challenged, realising that many people in social housing have had mortgages and successful careers, but that unfortunate circumstances have led them here, and they are struggling with coming to terms with it. Many of us could be a smaller step closer to that than we realise, and it got people thinking differently.”
Read the full Yorkshire Housing case study here.
Starting out on your journey towards customer-obsession
Changing organisational culture doesn’t happen overnight, and recognising the need to become customer-obsessed is just the first step.
Understanding your customers, their needs, priorities and challenges is crucial, and combines data from your systems as well making sure that everyone from front-line customer services to senior executives gets out there and talks to them.
As an organisation change consultancy, at AKD Solutions we understand the importance of preparing for and designing change as well as implementing and adapting to it. If you’d like our help to work out what becoming customer-obsessed could look like for you, get in touch.
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