Splendid Unlimited

In the UK, economic and social pressures are driving a rising demand for alternatives to one ownership. Yet the number of available housing stock is in steady decline. And as a result the industry is at a point of great challenge and stress. Tenants don’t like their landlords, and no-one wants to be a landlord. Clarion Housing Association, as the largest social housing provider in the UK, are at the forefront of both the solution and the front line. View the live site here: myclarionhousing.com

Clarion HA have aggressive plans to create more homes, and our remit was to ensure the the digital channels worked their hardest to support customers in their management of their home. Having understood (through hundreds of hours of research and insight) the problems, we devised a strategy of a staged approach to improvement – lead by our ‘Value Driven’ approach.

This enabled us to identify the biggest problems first. The top three: 

• Channel shift

• Paying rent

• Reporting repairs

Functionally, not an easy task. But how do you take a brand which is unloved, and create an experience customers won’t just interact with, but that will help change perceptions of the brand?

The solution relies on a lot that you CAN’T see. Shifting the way registrations to the platform happen from an assigned log in to a post-code-based validation makes sign up a thing of the past. Every customer is registered automatically to digital services. This is step one. We can now communicate directly with customers from day one, and link them to take action in the digital space right away. Onboarding is now a fact, not an option.

The clarity of the customer dashboard makes setting up payments, reporting repairs or just finding out about their tenancy or local area literally a click away.

Sounds simple, but this relies on changing the way the business works behind the scenes. And it was this process of using design to drive internal process change which makes this project special – a rare example of genuine user-centred product and service design.

This is step one. We are still engaged with the client and working on the post-MVP features now - the beginnings of a revolution in social housing. Our client is now able to think about how to best serve their customers - not just improving how they currently do it. And that’s paying dividends.