top of page
Formal feedback channels were structurally sound but behaviourally broken. Surveys and post-interaction questionnaires existed, but residents weren’t using them meaningfully. The data coming back was thin and impossible to act on strategically. Meanwhile, the organisation was making significant service and investment decisions without a reliable read on what residents actually experienced. The risk was commercial as well as reputational: money was being directed without the insight needed to prioritise it correctly, and leadership had no mechanism to know whether the decisions they were making were landing well until it was too late.
We ran structured experience research sessions across different resident demographics and tenancy lengths, not to measure satisfaction, but to understand residents’ relationship with the act of giving feedback itself. What emerged was a deeply entrenched belief, consistent across almost every group: feedback doesn’t change anything. Residents had shared views in the past, heard nothing back, and concluded the exercise was performative. This wasn’t apathy. It was rational disengagement based on lived experience. Improving response rates wasn’t a design problem. It was a trust problem, and trust problems require behavioural solutions, not better survey templates
We redesigned the feedback experience from the resident’s perspective outward. The process was made conversational rather than transactional. Visible loop closing was built in at every stage, residents were shown specifically what previous feedback had changed and what was currently under review as a direct result of their input. We tracked both volume and quality of feedback from week one. Resident initiated feedback increased 3.4 times within 90 days. More significant than the volume was the shift in content: residents began sharing nuanced, specific, actionable insight, friction points, unmet needs, and service improvement ideas that had never surfaced through formal channels. Leadership reviewed the quality of insight at 90 days and rated it a genuine step change from everything they had previously received.
Senior Customer Insight & Engagement Analyst
bottom of page