Earlier this month we introduced you to the work of the Digital Housing Repairs project: looking for ways in which we can improve the experience of requesting and receiving repairs for council tenants and leaseholders.
The project has been all about taking the time to understand the resident’s journey – and to use this to identify where the service might not be working as well as it could. We wanted to get a proper view of what the service is like for both our residents and our staff who work hard every day to help them. We got out on the road, riding along with our contractors, and interviewed residents to find out more about their experiences and opinions. Alongside this, the team have taken a forensic look at the data, getting to grips with the roughly 85,000 housing repairs, an average of over 200 a day, that we carry out in the borough every year!
We have now completed the first phase of the work – completing a ‘map’ of the resident journey for both internal and communal repairs and identifying the common pain points in this process. We’ve found eight key themes in our common issues and developed some first ideas about how we might fix them. Of the eight themes and ideas, three have been shortlisted to take forward for detailed design. These address many of the recommendations from the Task and Finish Group’s report into Communal Repairs and look at:
1) How do we create a single view of our housing to aid better decision making?
2) What are the nudges to improve the resident outcomes from the interactions between the contact centre-council-contractors?
3) How can we start to build better two-way resident communication?
To emphasise again, we want this to be an open and collaborative process and we would welcome any thoughts as we continue to develop this work, for this please email digital@lambeth.gov.uk
Now, we move from research to design – time to start making things! Stay tuned to this blog as we share the development of the products that will make the service more responsive, easy to use and effective.
