How giving everyone access to tenant feedback data sparked an appetite for insight and change across Gentoo
Picture this: you're a repairs manager at a busy housing association. Complaints are coming in thick and fast, but the data you need to understand what’s going on is trapped in last month’s Excel report. By the time it lands in your inbox, it’s already out of date.
You want to dig into the details. Spot patterns. Make things better for tenants. But the data lives in another department, owned by another team, organised in a way that doesn’t match how you think about your work.
That was the reality at Gentoo just a year ago. And today? It's a completely different story.
Michael McGuigan, Customer Voice Manager at Gentoo, describes what changed:
“We rolled out self-serve Power BI to our repairs and senior leadership team. In real time, they can understand complaints, numbers, customer sentiment, and look at their action plans. All the information is now at their fingertips.”
This wasn’t just a tech upgrade, it was a cultural shift. As soon as teams got direct access to live customer insight, something interesting happened. They wanted more of it…
Instead of reading reports once a month, teams could now:
Crucially, all of this was embedded into existing workflows. No need to log into another system or request a custom report. The insight was already there, ready to act on.
Before the change, data wasn’t easily accessible to everyone. Compliance owned the reports. Repairs waited for updates. Everyone worked in silos.
Now? Data is part of everyday conversations.
“I walk into the repairs department and people are genuinely interested in what we’re doing in customer voice,” says McGuigan. “That wasn’t the case a year ago.”
Giving teams ownership of insight changed how they saw their role, from reacting to complaints to genuinely caring about preventing them.
The shift wasn’t just cultural. It had a tangible business impact:
It became easier to allocate resources, identify themes, and respond proactively, not just tick boxes for compliance.
1. Designed for users, not administrators
Dashboards were shaped around how repairs teams actually work — not how IT teams preferred to organise data.
2. Training and support
Over 7,000 hours of training helped teams interpret and act on customer insight, not just process complaints.
3. Governance without bureaucracy
Automated workflows and built-in quality checks allowed fast access to insight without compromising compliance.
4. Continuous improvement
Regular feedback loops ensured the dashboards evolved with changing needs and remained relevant.
Gentoo didn’t start with technology, they started with business needs. They didn’t focus on features. They focused on how to make life easier for people doing the work. And when they made data accessible, immediate and relevant, it became something people wanted to use, not something they were told to. Here are 4 tips that housing associations can take from Gentoo’s learnings:
Gentoo's partnership with Wordnerds represents the next evolution of their CX strategy, moving from manual feedback analysis to automated insight generation. As McGuigan notes: "We've done everything in-house for the last 12 months, and a lot of that requires manual intervention. Automation is a game changer."
Gentoo’s transformation wasn’t just about building a dashboard. It was about changing how people think about data…not as a reporting tool, but as something that helps them serve customers better, every day.
When everyone has access to the same insight, you create a culture of curiosity. Ownership. Action.
In this environment, where expectations are high and scrutiny is rising, real-time customer insight is the catalyst for effective change.
And the real question isn’t: “Can we afford to do this?”
It’s: “Can we afford not to?”
Watch the full webinar with Michael McGuigan, VoC Manager at Gentoo Group, here:
