Voice of our Customers

The aim of this project was to find out how customers perceive our digital services, in order to make improvements to the portal. One-to-one interviews with our customers helped us to better understand customers' needs and bring them into the portal design.

During the project we also asked customers what they would like from the portal in the future, which we aim to build into our plans. Ultimately, it’s helped us gain a more customer-centric approach to or digital approach.

When we introduced our new name and brand, we also began using a new way of communicating with our customers and colleagues. We wanted to know what our customers thought of this, so we created a focus group with them.

The insight our customers gave us was really important, as it helped us shape our new tone of voice. They highlighted the importance of using language that is widely understood, using bullet points to cover off key information, and choosing accessible colours in our design.

What our customers told us about our tone of voice has been a big inspiration for how we communicate with them now. Every letter we send is checked to ensure it’s in line with our new language style, and we’ve rolled out training across the whole business to make sure our colleagues know how to use it.

In the past year we’ve been working collaboratively with our customers on the Abri design brief. This will be used for every new home we build, so it was essential we heard directly from our customers about what should be included.

We created four focus groups with customers, each focusing on a separate section of the design brief. The conversations we shared during this time provided lots of insight into what we needed to include – including street furniture and increasing biodiversity on our sites – and these things and more are now being incorporated into it.

A lot of what we do is in direct response to what our customers tell us they would benefit from. This is about being proactive in prioritising the needs of our customers and then responding with appropriate action. Here’s a few examples of that.

• Our customers said they were concerned about anti-social behaviour in local parks and open spaces in Gosport. So we worked with Hampshire police and Mutual Gain to host World Café, part of a national campaign to help tackle serious youth crime.
• Our customers said they wanted the Longwood Park Tots group to continue virtually during Covid-19 restrictions. So we helped the group setup a WhatsApp for families and provided craft ideas for families to do.
• Our customers said they couldn’t report certain repairs on the portal. So we’ve added more types of repairs to it so they can be reported through the portal too.