Outside view

By Hasani Jess, Board member, settle

When I’m asked about how technology in housing compares to other sectors I’ve worked in, I’d say the trend is to follow rather than lead. This is an often-solid strategy, and it still leaves plenty of space for ambition, talent and opportunity to create something special.

So, why do we tend to follow and not lead? • It reduces risk as the learning is done by someone else further along the risk-reward spectrum • It can be easier to stick with the technology devil you know.

At the heart of everything we do is the customer we provide housing and other services to. And with all the challenges we must work with, innovating with digital solutions is going to be one of the key tools we have to improve the experiences and lives of our customers.

Looking to other sectors can provide plenty of inspiration. I’ve been in technology roles across retail, travel, telecommunications and government, and there’s no shame in copying or adapting successful ideas from those fields to assist in making things better for our colleagues and customers in housing.

Many in the housing sector will be working with systems and processes first completed manually and then moved to a digital environment. We’re operating within an environment where more and more businesses are benefitting from digital-first thinking. Indeed, our residents will increasingly measure us against the great experiences they have from businesses and organisations across all aspects of their lives.

Of course, we must involve our customers and colleagues – what’s the point of an all-singing, all-dancing digital platform if no one uses it, or if it doesn’t solve their issues? We need to build solutions that our customers want rather than just replicating what’s gone before. settle recently created a new website, but before we did anything we asked our customers what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it. And the important bit: using Agile techniques. We created a website based on that feedback and tested it with them on their devices before it went live.

We’ve also seen huge success with taking engagement online for our regeneration projects. Whilst we still carry out face-to-face events, online platforms give opportunity to those customers who can’t come and meet us, or simply prefer to give us their feedback digitally. This has enabled us to gather significantly more responses – with the feedback being in many ways richer, as respondents could take their time and be more open with their views.

While by no means perfect, our focus on the user experience and communications to make sure customers are aware of digital improvements and how they will benefit from them, as well as investment in upskilling our people resources, are fundamental.

Across housing we tend to see many different tech solutions being used, each with strengths and weaknesses, and varying levels of compatibility. Variety and choice are positives and should drive innovation. They also make it more difficult to create consistent ways of reacting to the needs of our customers and thus impacting our ability as a sector to deliver the best experience they deserve and we want to create.

We see immense goodwill across the sector and commitment to doing the best we can, together. At settle, we’ve set up innovative partnerships to enhance our work on sustainability. This is a solid foundation to replicate with learnings for our digital offerings.

We’ve a real opportunity to lead the way in innovation here, and we aim for settle’s digital strategy, focussing on the digital home, customer and community, to enable us to do just that.