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The role of service design in social housing

In this blog post, Becky Mallaband, our Head of Learning Design talks to Dave Skinner (formerly of Incommunities Housing Association) about the role Service Design has to play in the housing sector.

Becky: How did you get into Service Design, Dave?

Dave: I have been involved in youth and community development throughout my career. Through Covid-19, I was looking for ways that people had successfully worked collaboratively online, I came across Scrum, and then landed on digital services and the digital industry. Part of that was user-centred design (UCD): understanding what a UCD team was combined of, research, content design etc.

The reality is I’ve always been involved in service improvement. It’s always been a running theme, I just used different terminology for it, as I’d come from an educational background.

Becky: This is quite a common rhetoric, we see a lot of people that realise they are actually doing Service Design (SD), or at least applying some of the same skills, but in different disciplines and roles.

So why did you want to apply SD into housing?

Dave: When I started working in housing there was a pressing need to get a shared understanding of how services work and to view a tenant’s experience as an equal partner in that understanding – in came service design.

At the moment the approach to understanding a tenant’s experience is about the overall experience, i.e. how did you experience this service out of 5, or a consultation with 3 people on an experience committee who maybe aren’t representative of the rest of the group of people using the services, so there’s a long way to go.

“Service Design encourages us to understand the detail of [the tenant’s] experience.”

Becky: It’s surprising how often something labelled ‘user research’ is conducted without ever speaking to the end user! I think this is where the upskilling and training piece is really essential, to articulate what understanding your users really looks like, and what that can mean for your organisation.

“Dave: The customer voice teams across housing associations are going to be faced with a challenge of how we build on the Tenant Satisfaction Measures and overall satisfaction, and on to a deep understanding of experience on a service level, not just at an organisational level.”

Becky: It seems quite difficult for people to understand that we can have a mixed method approach between the two.

Becky: Where can SD make the most difference in the housing sector?

Dave: It has to be for the tenants renting social housing. A tenant living in social housing has severely limited choice in who they use for many services and are locked into their landlords offering, therefore there is a higher moral obligation for housing providers to provide good services.

“Choice is really important, and choice is the thing in social housing that is lacking the most.”

In housing any service that interacts with customers should be viewed through the lens of both tenant experience and business process – this is where service design comes in, giving us the full picture.

When these two are viewed as equal parts of the same journey, real tenant centred change can happen – ultimately improving services and improving the experiences for tenants.

Becky: How do you think the housing sector differs from other sectors in this area?

Dave: One of the big differences is that other sectors have seen a big rise in service design, but it is definitely not established in housing. Although this doesn’t mean there aren’t some great examples of service design being used in this space.

Becky: Where is service design being used in the housing sector right now? 

Dave: Mainly in the design and implementation of digital services, where there are some service design professionals, but more often service design is provided by expert consultant organisations.

Becky: Where is service design not being used in the housing sector, but should be?

Dave: The examples of service design in housing often seem to be centred around digital services exclusively. However there is a real space for using a service design approach as a holistic tool for understanding how non-digital services work and are experienced by tenants.

Equally, as the sector moves increasingly towards digital transformation of services, service design offers the opportunity to understand how services operate, where the good bits are and where the dysfunction lies – in preparation for any transformation program. This is only ever going to set an organisation up for success.

Becky: Is there anywhere that Service Design does not have the answers in the housing sector?

Dave: I don’t think that SD has the answer for a long term plan to end the housing crisis. This will require long term and cross-political party collaboration to end homelessness and provide secure and suitable homes for the approximately 8.5 million people who need it.

Becky: What are the biggest barriers to implementing service design in the housing sector?

Dave: Finance is a big barrier. For budget holders there are significant competing priorities. It’s often hard to justify spending money on service design expertise when there are immediate problems with safety or a need for more front line staff, for example.

There are also changes in legislation that add more financial pressure.

There is an aging stock of homes, built in the 40’s and 50’s -a lot of them are in need of updates, which creates pressure in the system.

There’s also a lack of awareness around what service design can offer housing organisations.

Becky: So how can we overcome some of those barriers?

Dave: Service design needs to be angled as making sure it reduces things like risks of complaints and improving the voice of the customer. Safety and lives are on the line if the wrong decisions are prioritised.

Becky: So really we need to ensure that SD is seen as something that helps with these complex issues, not as a competing priority.

Becky: How do you recommend introducing and advocating for service design in your sector?

Dave: Service Design offers an opportunity to design and view services from the outside in, and most (if not all) providers have a commitment to be more customer-focussed.

Service Design offers a great platform to place tenant experience as an equal in organisational mapping, understanding and improvement. You can look at improving tenant experience and business process at the same time, next to each other.

“Start small. Create a service list, map a service and remember that transparency and shared understanding is valuable (even before any service improvements are made)”.

Becky: Where would you like to see the sector in 5 years from now?

Dave: The obvious answer is service design is recognised and embedded in social housing providers, widely.

But also the recognition that a tenant’s experience of a service is a fundamental part of understanding how organisations work and how improvements should be made (with this squarely in mind and understood to a deep level) – service design in conjunction with good tenant research would be great to see.

I would love to see teams organised around service journeys instead of vertical departmental organisational structures.

I would love tenants to be sat in the room too.

Closing remarks from NEC Digital Studio:

At NEC Digital Studio we have expertise in the housing sector, both from a Service Design perspective and from our work in supplying management software to the housing sector as part of NEC Software Solutions. We believe Service Design can have a measurable impact on the housing sector, and we would love to talk about the specific issues that you face to see how we can help. Get in touch with our team to find out more.  

If you’d like to talk specifically about how we can help upskill and train your organisation in Service Design or User Centred Design, please email: designschool@necsws.com

If you would like to read more on this subject, we recommend checking out Dave’s design patterns for social housing project.