Town & Country’s CX Challenges
Theo Scott, Customer Data and Insight Manager at Town and Country and his team were facing several challenges in understanding and acting on resident feedback prior to discovering Wordnerds:
- They were spending hours manually analysing customer feedback, rather than spending time on things that would actually move the needle: "I remember three, four years ago, I was hours and hours looking at Excel spreadsheets, trying to brand the different comments into useful information"
- Themes were being inconsistently categorised, resulting in inaccurate data analysis: "Depending on how I felt that day I might put a comment in a different theme and it was very hard to be consistent and reliable."
- A pressing need to keep up with and demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements: "With the regulation changes coming forth in terms of respectful and helpful engagement, we really needed to get a grip of how we can get a better understanding of what residents feel about our services."
- Trying to keep up with increasing volumes of qualitative data: "We started to add more open comment fields rather than just closed comments. And that's when the problem really started for us".
- Not being able to discover the ‘why’ behind quant numbers: "Whilst we've got a lot of quantitative stuff, qualitatively we need to understand what drives the satisfaction and dissatisfaction".
The Solution
After receiving a call from Wordnerds, Theo was initially skeptical about having a tool that everyone in the business would actually buy in to, but intrigued by what sounded like a simple solution to a complex problem.
The Path to Wordnerds Implementation
Theo's journey with Wordnerds followed these particular steps:
➡ 1) Initial demo: "Helen organised a demo... I really liked what I heard"
➡ 2) Organisational hesitation: "I don't know whether Social Housing is ready for this... housing has always been very slow to embrace innovation"
➡ 3) Proof of Concept: "What we decided to do was look at data from a year back of all our transactional surveys and actually see what it would tell us"
➡ 4) Executive Buy-in: "It made a really major impact... my executive team got it, and they gave me the blessing to go full steam ahead"
What Wordnerds help town and country to do:
After achieving buy in town and country now uses Wordnerds for a range of use cases to:
- Analyse open-ended resident comments from all of their feedback sources
- Identify themes and trends with specificity and depth
- Easily generate regular insight reports for key customer-facing managers
- Focus on specific geographic areas using postal code filtering, to segment feedback based on area and dive deeper into specific problems
- Integrate qualitative insights with their existing Power BI dashboards to share insights across the business
The Change in CX with Wordnerds
- Confidence in recommendations and decision making: "Wordnerds has helped me to save time and actually stopped me putting a business case in for more resources"
- Can focus on creating meaningful change for customers: "It's allowed us to save so much time to focus on the recommendations, support managers to actually drive those recommendations"
"Residents were always complaining that the communal cleaning was never done to a satisfactory standard. There was this thing whereby they felt that the contractor was using dirty water... we'd done a very deep dive just looking at Waters Edge with Wordnerds, trying to understand the trend. When we challenged the contractor, we pulled out all the reports from Wordnerds... showing them word for word what residents were saying about dirty water." - Theo Scott
The result? The contractor admitted to using dirty water due to lack of access to taps, which led Town and Country to install taps in various locations on the estate, resolving the issue.
- Showing customers that they’re listening and acting on their feedback: "When we've had to meet with residents... we've actually shown customers how we use Wordnerds. And they've been really engaged in that whole process. We've been able to show them that we actually use their feedback to drive actionable change"
- A new culture of decision making based on accurate, in-depth data: "It's really embedded into our culture now how we use data to drive service improvements"
- Quick, accurate and in-depth analysis customised for their business case: "The system, because it's trained, is going to be very consistent and 99% of the time it's going to be quite accurate"
The Wordnerds Experience
We pride ourselves on having good relationships with our customers and Theo emphasised the value of the ongoing partnership with Wordnerds:
- Excellent customer success support: "The Wordnerds team has been supportive... we've got a real great customer success manager who we meet with on a regular basis"
- Successful onboarding and ongoing training: "They've been very supportive in actually helping us to understand and to provide training and support in how we use the system"
- Intuitive and easy to use platform: "What I found is easier, and particularly my staff members, is the ease and effort of working with Wordnerds in terms of interrogating the system, uploading the data, pulling the right data down"
Advice for Other Housing Providers
We asked Theo if he had any advice to other housing organizations considering Wordnerds:
"Don't be scared because people are thinking AI, what is a social housing organisation doing looking at AI and using that to understand what residents are saying? It's been great in terms of saving time, great accuracy, and it helps you to clearly understand what residents are saying with context. It helps you to understand where you need to focus your energy with actionable insights based on real evidence."
