By Paul Harris, Executive Director, Customer Experience at Curo

We’re obsessed with measurement in this sector, more so than any other I’ve worked in.

There are all sorts of factors that have brought us here: regulation (which is obviously going to be stepped up in years to come); pressure from government and residents (particularly in the wake of Grenfell); and, I suppose, a strong and almost slavish belief that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.

And there’s nothing wrong with this. A lack of measurement isn’t a good thing – how do you make decisions, invest effectively or foster strong relationships if you’ve no idea what the impact of anything you do is?

The key thing, however, is what we’re measuring. How far do we focus on the ‘measures that matter’, the ones that should really inform what we do? How much do we really understand what our measures are telling us, and are these measures focusing on the things which our customers feel are the most important?

I’m sure we’ve all spent a lot of time in recent years revising and improving the KPIs and dashboards we routinely produce. We’re still in that mode at Curo – we review everything each year, make some changes and sign them off with our board.

What we’re going to be doing over the next year, though, is introducing some additional parameters to this exercise, which we hope will make our measurement more effective in improving our services and decision-making.

A lot of what we measure has already happened. In the same way fund managers base their investment strategies on how stocks have performed in the past, most of what we look at in housing are lagging indicators: how quickly did we answer the phones; how long did it take
us to deliver a repair; how much did we spend per home. And these are important to understand – but they keep us firmly rooted in the past and what we’ve been doing historically. As we continue to go through an unprecedented period of change, looking for more leading indicators, trends and predictive analytics will be a positive step forward.

We also feel there’s a lack of alignment between some of what we measure and what customers really want. What I hear from our customers again and again is that they want a problem-free home and neighbourhood; and when something goes wrong, they want it sorted quickly and permanently. But this won’t be true for all customers, and one of the things we need to get better at is understanding the needs of different types of customer, and tailoring our services – and our measures – accordingly.

This is particularly important for customers with physical or mental health challenges, who to some degree we try to work with in the same way as everyone else. Perhaps some of our historic structures and conversations (i.e. our resident involvement frameworks) also need a refresh to deliver this.

Finally, we’re going to be more forensic in the way we create a clear line of sight from individual objectives and targets, and those measures which demonstrate progress against our long-term strategy. Currently I feel there’s a degree of separation between what’s measured at different levels of our organisation, and this causes confusion.

Your organisation may already have cracked this. My hope for Curo is that by focusing more on leading indicators, and measures which relate to customer needs from which we can derive meaningful insight, we’ll be able to further improve. It’ll be interesting to see how all of
this relates to the new ‘common performance metrics’ we’re likely to be using in the future.