Stadium Housing Association

 

Client

Stadium Housing Association is the founder and largest member of the Network Housing Group. It owns and manages more than 8,500 homes across London and the south-east of England.

 

Brief

Stadium approached The Bridge Group for some fresh ideas on consulting customers - and to solve a particular puzzle. Despite high levels of investment on new kitchens and bathrooms as part of its Decent Homes programme, the Association was only achieving moderate levels of customer satisfaction for this sort of improvement.  Stadium asked us to find out the reasons behind this and suggest ways of boosting resident satisfaction with new kitchens and bathrooms.

 

The Association was experiencing some familiar problems with its approach to customer involvement.  Input and feedback tended to be from a small and pretty static group of customers, whose views did not necessarily reflect wider opinions.  Attempts to attract and engage with a broader range of customers had seen low levels of take-up and resulted in poor value for money and impact.

 

Working with Stadium’s surveying partners, the Frankham Consultancy Group, we encouraged the client to focus on the specific topic of kitchens and bathrooms and try out some inventive, inexpensive ways of engaging and consulting with people. We also forged relationships with the main contractors and suppliers to make them part of the project and fully signed up to the challenge of achieving better kitchens and bathrooms - and happier, more satisfied residents.

 

Activity

We spoke to residents about their experiences of refurbishment at a Stadium Open Day.  We  recruited people to take part in a mix of telephone conferences, focus groups and a study visit to the kitchen supplier’s trade centre.  We also gathered all the documentation used to communicate with residents from start to finish and looked critically at the systems in place to secure and monitor quality of the finished kitchens and bathrooms.

 

On the back of this research, we visited and interviewed residents before, during and after their kitchen/bathroom replacements.

 

We asked the customers to fill in special ‘journey maps’ to plot the highs and lows of the refurbishment process.  This quickly highlighted a key finding - that residents base their satisfaction on the whole experience of the refurbishment, not just the finished kitchen or bathroom.  The value of a shiny new kitchen or bathroom is easily undermined if the customer has to endure weeks of disruption and inconvenience to get it.

 

Our research flagged up an unintended downside of partnering contracts.  Because all the communication with residents about kitchen and bathroom replacements came from contractors, surveyors and suppliers, residents tended not to see the improvements as being part of their relationship with Stadium as the landlord.  Stadium’s staff usually only got involved if something went wrong, and the Association wasn’t being recognised for its investment and asset management. To put this right, our design studio created a ‘Looking after your home’ sub-brand, based on Stadium’s corporate logo, to feature on all future refurbishment correspondence and documents.

 

Using our media skills and contacts, we secured trade publicity on the research findings.   We were also invited to speak about the project at a National Housing Federation regional event.

 

We rounded-off the consultation with a visit to Stadium’s kitchen supplier, at the Howdens ExpoCentre in Orpington. This event proved a valuable lesson in how getting the right people together can generate innovation; between them Stadium residents, staff, contractors, consultants and suppliers came up with some great ideas to improve the choice and quality of new kitchens.

 

Stadium’s Executive Team was quick to appreciate the importance of this project and accepted all 37 of our final report’s recommendations for better kitchens and bathrooms.  Crucially, some of the residents who took part in the research also volunteered to work alongside staff as a customer audit group to oversee implementation.

 

Outcome

The ‘Better kitchens and bathrooms’ project shone some much-needed light into important parts of Stadium’s systems, services and relationships with its customers.  And the organisation has responded in a decisive and flexible way that has really made a difference. One resident who took part in the consultation reported seeing “…really positive changes in the attitude and responsiveness from both Stadium and their partners… that is nothing short of miraculous!”  The same resident also praised The Bridge Group for “…courage and integrity in tackling the important issues head on.”

 

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