Service Design in the Housing Sector

Becky: Where did you hear about Service Design?

Colin: Our chief executive, Lorna is a big believer in service design and she’d used the tools and the theories for previous roles that she held in different organisations. When she came to Barrhead, she introduced some tools and ideas around service design and they landed quite well. 

I took it on in terms of leading for the organisation, because my team leads in customer care  and effectively we may be the best place to look at service design. So, I signed up for the Service Design Champions course (run by NEC Digital Studio through the Scottish Digital Academy) which was early in 2025, and didn’t look back to be honest. I really enjoyed those two days.

Becky: What is it about the service design approach that attracted you? 

Colin: I like the idea of the customer being at the core of how services are designed, but also that services are designed so they’re accessible to all. And that was a big thing that came through the training. Just because you assume you could access a service you’re creating, it doesn’t mean that everybody else could. 

Quite often, in my career anyway, teams have been designing services that definitely worked for them, and they could definitely access those things, but they hadn’t really thought about the customer. then they got upset about why nobody’s using their services properly, and why things aren’t going correctly. And I think particularly for me, in social housing, our customers, our tenants, are often some of the most vulnerable and disconnected people and societies, and they’ve got the highest rates of being digitally disconnected from the rest of society. So, it’s important for us, given we’re delivering these critical services, that nobody’s left behind. And Service Design, for me anyway, is one of the ways that we can ensure that everyone can access our services. 

Becky: How do you think service design will or could have an impact on your organisation?

Colin: Our organisation has lots of talents, but we’re not particularly diverse. I’m hoping that people will look beyond their own envelope and think about diversity in general, and not just diversity in a traditional sense of ethnicity or disability, but also about access, in terms of people’s mindsets and different ways of living. Learning about personas was good and I think the guys enjoyed that a lot.

So if the team can get that into the mindset, and think about the customers and how the end service might look, then I think we’ll start thinking beyond the process and we’ll look more at people. 

Becky: Do you get the impression it will have an impact on the mindsets of people in your organisation?

Colin: I think it will. For the people in the organisation that work with our customers face to face, I would certainly like to think that they are going to reflect on how they engage with our customers. In the teams that aren’t necessarily facing customers, maybe not. But I think the organisation needs to understand that we have customers, and we need to think about the things that we do, whether it’s invoices or letting a house, that the customers are really the purpose of all that, it too easy to get caught up in the process. So, at the very least I hope people will look beyond their part of the process and think about ‘how does this fit in the order?’, like machinery. 

Becky: I think it’s actually the people that think they have no impact on the customer’s journey or don’t see customers face to face, so think ‘what difference does it make to me?’, they’re the people you want to get to the most. You want to help them understand that even if you’re not having that direct contact with customers, several steps down the road, your decisions are impacting the end user. 

Colin: Oh, absolutely. I can recall when I worked in a different place and they had a very rigid finance system, where they did refunds every two weeks. I had a tenant who needed a refund, as they had overpaid the rent; they said, ‘they’ll get it in two weeks’. I tried to make them understand that two weeks is like two years to this person – they need the money right now. If your process is so inflexible that it can’t possibly deviate, that’s a terrible system. They never considered the possibility that their systems had customers. So even though I was their customer, the tenants are also customers, the suppliers are also customers. It seemed like they were only thinking about what was making the job easiest for themselves. 

Becky: And did you get anywhere? 

Colin: Eventually I got an ad hoc payment to this one particular person, but it was very much framed as ‘this is a favour for you’. I didn’t really want a favour, I just want the system to work. Imagine you paid your mortgage twice. You’d be devastated, and imagine if the bank told you, ‘you’ll get it back in a month’. Whilst a very finance specific example, it’s useful, because if you’re not working with customers, you maybe forget that you have customers and stakeholders. And if you’re designing your process and your service for the internal, you need to think about external customers as well.  

Becky: It’s also about acknowledging that it’s not all about the tenants, but your customers might look very different – your customers might be staff and that’s absolutely fine. But you still want to think about them and what their needs are and how it works for them, and keeping them at the centre of the internal services you’re offering.

Colin:  That’s exactly it. As long as you can think about the wider picture, I’ll be quite happy. That’s really my objective for everyone. 

Becky: Were there certain elements of the training that people grasped onto and you thought, that’s probably where we’re going to see a bit of growth? 

Colin: I think the mapping landed best with most teams because it’s such a visual way of seeing what they’re wanting to do, and what people are thinking, feeling and the back office operations. I think that really helped, so I’m hoping to see something of that in the new year.  

Part of my plan for next year, is to have something similar to an equalities impact assessment, that you have when you develop a policy. I want people to understand when they’re writing something or creating something new or redesigning something, that they can’t just do it. They’ve got to go and understand the user perspective and that will be a necessary step in any process that we can do. So we’re going to try and embed the principles of service design in there. That’s the ambition of it, that it will be a very much unavoidable step, that you must do as part of any work that you do in that respect.  

Becky: That’s really cool. It’s part of moving up the maturity ladder of service design in your organisation. 

Colin: I would like that to be the case. 

I would like that everyone in the team understood that this is what we do and we don’t do it because it makes me happy, we do because it works. So watch this space. 

Becky: Is there anything you’re most looking forward to trying?

Colin: I’d really like to work on personas. We know so much about our customers, so we could design real life scenario personas that we could use to design our services and we could actually see what an impact using those personas and our tools would be. But also the user centred research – getting customers in a room, and asking them. Quite a lot of landlords pay lip service to that, they’ll set people down and they call it tenant participation (or various other terms for it). They’ll listen to folk, but they won’t actually act on what they’re saying. So, if the tenant tells them I want X,Y and Z, they will give them A,B and C instead. What was the point in doing that? It has to be meaningful user centred research, where we actually look forward to what they are telling us and embed that into the process.  

Becky: Otherwise, people stop talking to you as well, don’t they? We want to make sure we’re talking to people outside of the tenant engagement group. 

Colin: We call them the service improvement group (SIG). They do a good job and they get involved when we ask them to, but it’s only 6 people, and it’s the same 6 people,  so I do worry that [if] you get the same 6 voices – you’re going to get the same outcomes and answers. 

When we set up the SIG, I anticipated a pool of people, (50 – 100) that we would draw from for different projects. I think that was ambitious, but that is where I want us to get to.

Becky: What do you think the barriers to service design are in your organisation? 

Colin: I mentioned before the mindset, and that’s certainly a similar thing for us  – the idea that we know best, and as long as we can access [a service], then everything’s absolutely fine. As an example, we brought in a customer portal and a couple of chat bots on our website, which I think are fab, but they’re not very well used. So it would be good to understand why they’re not used. I think if we’ve done that before we launched them, maybe we’d have [seen] better take up. There’s definitely a problem there. Stop trying to fix it before we understand the wider issue. 

Becky: It’s hard to get out of that mindset, isn’t it? Because it can feel like you’re pausing doing anything in order to do the research. 

Colin: It’s such a human instinct to try and problem solve, and you ‘re almost defying your instincts and your gut to do that. 

Quick solutions are seldom good solutions. I think if you’re doing a quick solution quite often, it’s not the right one.

Becky: Any thoughts on how service design could impact the kind of wider housing sector?

Colin:  We’re quite a paternalistic or maternalistic sector; we impose services on customers. There’s debate whether we actually have customers or not. If I don’t like British Gas, I can move to Octopus or I don’t like O2, I can move to Virgin. If our tenants don’t like Barrhead Housing as a landlord, they have to move house. ‘Customer’ implies you can take your custom elsewhere, so there’s probably debate there to be had about that.  

But I think if the housing sector as a whole was to embrace service design, they might start thinking about our customers as real customers and then will have to start designing services to actually make them want to stay with us.  Our customer satisfaction is pretty good, it’s not great across the sector though. I think if you ask tenants about their satisfaction with the landlord north, the fact that they are a necessary evil might be the theme that came out of it. 

I think we need to imagine that they could vote with their feet, and maybe people would start designing better services, rather than just an adequate service that does something, but not everything.  

Becky: You then need people within those organisations that care enough about the tenants, regardless of whether someone can vote with their feet, and say that they want their experience to be the best one we can provide. What would you say to other housing associations that aren’t yet aware of, or haven’t trialled a Service Design approach? 

Colin: I think the first thing to ask is are their teams eager to learn? Our team was, and they’re quite keen. We talked about it and kind of soft launched the idea of doing the service design training. So anybody [considering a service design approach] needs to think are their teams ready for it? Then think about, where is their mindset at? If they’re bureaucratic and they don’t want to change the way they work, then it probably isn’t for them, unless they’ve got a real driver of change at the top. But ask themselves questions like, when’s the last time they sat down with a tenant, listened to them and then used the feedback to actually change something, or did they just note it and put in a file and leave it forever. I think if they’re willing to do that, then they’re probably ready, but if we’re just doing it because it sounds cool or because the peer landlords do it, then they definitely shouldn’t do it.

Becky: It’s those maturity levels again, you have to be ready to even investigate stepping onto that first step. 

Colin: I think if you can accept that your services could be better, then that’s a great start to thinking about designing them. But if you are of the mindset that we are hitting all of our KPIs and everything’s great, then I don’t think it’s for you. 

We’re always trying to be better. I’m sure lots of landlords will get a lot out of this if they take it forward, they’ll create such great services. I think the inclusion and accessibility part, where the tenants are disconnected with the rest of the society, if they can bridge some of those gaps with Service Design, then they should do that.