By Colin Wiles, housing consultant.

Last week, I chaired a Residents’ Network session for HQN with a mix of engagement staff from local authorities and housing associations. One of the issues we discussed was whether there was a good portal for residents to engage with their landlord; but we also talked about the use of social media by housing providers, and in particular using it to provide customer service rather than as a tool for corporate puffery (“customer” is not a word I like but I will use it throughout this blog for simplicity).

I think it is fair to say that other customer-facing sectors are streets ahead of social housing when it comes to social media. I did a quick random survey of six of the largest housing associations – and the results were not very encouraging. All of them had a Twitter presence but the number of followers ranged from fewer than 150 to over 12,600. Two only had a corporate account that also dealt with a handful of customer enquires a day. Some provided a separate customer enquiry link or telephone number.

Four of the six had both a corporate account and a customer account, but two key features stood out: firstly, all of the accounts I looked at were only dealing with a handful of customer queries, ranging from one or two to five or six a day on average; secondly, all of them only operated during working hours on weekdays, with one closing at 4.00pm and the latest shutting up shop at 8.00pm.

On Facebook, the picture was not so good. Two of the six appeared to have no Facebook presence at all. The number of followers of the remaining four ranged from 1,300 to 2,400.

Interestingly, two of the six had parallel independent Facebook groups set up by unhappy customers. I was recently asked to join one of these that has almost 2,000 members. The litany of complaints makes for depressing reading and seem to be completely at odds with the corporate publicity that is being put out.

On this site, a problem had arisen with moderation, with the landlord accusing the mods of allowing abusive language, and this had been cited as a reason for refusing to engage. There had been counter claims that the landlord had infiltrated the site in order to “spy” on residents.

The page moderators were encouraging customers to go on Trustpilot and give the association a low rating, but the association had been challenging many of the negative reviews. Trust is out of the window. All in all, it is a sorry state of affairs.

Three conclusions spring to mind as a result of this quick survey.

First, more and more of us now rely upon smartphones for every aspect of daily living; we expect immediate, snappy responses 24/7, and the ability to buy and pay for things on the go. We do not want to spend hours on the phone listening to musak or to be required to engage in meetings and long-winded consultations in order to get our views across.

Second, housing has traditionally been a five-day week, nine to five operation, backed up by an out of hours emergency service, and this is reflected in the way that associations have set up their social media. If you tweet them on Friday night, you will receive no response until Monday morning. This is no longer good enough.

As a case in point, consider the Southeastern trains Twitter account (I use them a lot). It has 237,000 followers and is open 24/7, tweeting hundreds of times a day with service updates and responses to customers (passengers). Yet Southeastern’s turnover is £850m, about the same as one of our largest associations.

As I said, other sectors are streets ahead.

Third, I think part of the reason for our sector’s sluggish response is that the most active residents have tended to be from the older demographic. Many of them grew up in an age when landlines and letters were the norm and many still prefer what we would consider oldfashioned forms of communication.

This means that landlords have stuck fast to a wide range of communication channels, rather than investing in a simpler engagement methodology. This ends up being rather confusing and frustrating for customers, and pleasing no one.

The world is changing rapidly. It is a bit like the (callous) argument that has been used about Brexit voters shuffling off this mortal coil. Within the next 10 to 20 years, almost every customer, active or otherwise, will be familiar with the way smartphones work. They will have
grown up with Facebook and will have a range of apps on their phone.

They will expect to be able to engage with their landlord day and night and at weekends, whether to order repairs, make complaints, or pay the rent. It will be the new normal.

So, customer engagement strategies will need to adapt to this new world. Learning from the technology behind the excellent gov.uk websites and some of the social media apps will be important. That does not necessarily mean Twitter or Facebook, because other platforms might come along to replace them, but it does mean being nimble and responsive to a changing world and a changing demographic.

Engaging with social media is a tricky business that could backfire and should not be undertaken lightly. In my view, you should either do it with enthusiasm and inject huge resources into it or not do it at all. The middle of the road is the worst place to be.