Providing customers with an excellent service, each and every time' - Karbon Homes talks customer experience
Karbon Homes, a social housing provider which owns and manages close to 30,000 homes across the North East and Yorkshire, has one mission – to provide a strong foundation for life.
The organisation works across diverse communities, where people face different opportunities and challenges. Some customers just need an affordable home while others need a bit more. Whatever customers need to feel more secure, confident and happy with where they’re at, Karbon aims to provide it, helping to build better lives for its customers.
Ian Johnson, Karbon’s Executive Director of Customer Service, chats to Northern Insight about Karbon’s approach to providing an excellent customer experience and the role that plays in achieving the organisation’s mission of ‘providing strong foundations for life’.
“What makes for excellent customer service is always changing and the great customer experience benchmark is not one set by us, but one set by our customers. We know one size doesn’t fit all and that our customers require a service that recognises their individual circumstances and expectations.
“To ensure we provide customers with an excellent service, each and every time they come into contact with us, we need to meet these expectations and, where possible exceed them. To us, that means being ambitious in our approach to customer experience, working hard to personalise the service we offer and ensure it is local and relevant to each customer.”
Ian acknowledges that a crucial part of achieving service excellence is through continually measuring performance, in order to build a real understanding of how the organisation is doing.
“The measure we tend to look at first is our customer net promoter score (NPS). It’s a measurement that is widely used and, thanks to its consistent format, it paints us an accurate picture of how we’re performing. “Our score is established by asking customers how likely they are to recommend us to their friends and family if they were in a similar situation and looking for housing. Consistent monitoring of this is important as it allows us to recognise and celebrate our successes, building on what we’re doing well, as well as to identify areas where we really need to improve.
“We’re pleased to say that our customer NPS (at time of interview) sits at +53. Anything above 0 is considered good, and above 50 is excellent – so we’re currently in a great position as an organisation.”
Despite this positive score, Ian understands that the true measure of success is not built on numbers alone.
“Monitoring numerical performance data is valuable but we also need to really hear what our customers are telling us. Karbon is committed to building meaningful relationships with our customers, ensuring that our customers’ voices are heard and that they have a direct impact on our service delivery. We listen to our customers in lots of different ways, consulting with them on key projects and involving them in much of our decision-making.
“A group of our customers recently undertook a review of our approach to building and customer safety and produced a report for us. They gave us a list of recommendations from their perspective, which will help us progress forward with our work.
“Insight like this really helps us keep customer experience front and centre in our work and ensure we are truly customer focussed.”
With service excellence at the forefront of Karbon’s strategic plan for the coming years, Ian outlines what Karbon is doing to continue strengthening the quality of the service it provides.
“The social housing sector is facing a number of challenge currently, challenges that we’re taking very seriously and working hard to overcome. We’re continually working to promote a culture that supports an excellent customer experience throughout our organisation, to ensure we demonstrate a positive commitment to customers.”
To do this it’s key that we enable our colleagues to gain the knowledge, skills and behaviours that support a more personalised service for customers and provide them with access to the tools that allow them to do so.”
