What does it mean to 'own' the customer journey when thinking about Future Homes Standard homes?

This time, Chris speaks with:

• Katie Gilmartin from Platform Housing Group
• Tom Dollard from architects Pollard Thomas Edwards.

Get all the latest hints and tips on how to help your customers get ready for the Future Homes Standard in our Knowledge Centre here.

Welcome to the Future Homes podcast, where we look closely at the ideas, policies and practical challenges shaping how homes are being designed, built and delivered in the UK today.

My name is Chris Gaze, and this time we're exploring what it means to own the customer journey when considering new homes that will be complying to the Future Homes Standard. Our guests for this one are Tom Dollard from architects Pollard Thomas Edwards and Katie Gilmartin from Platform Housing Group.

We're starting this time by reminding ourselves about the key differences between homes that are Future Homes Standard-ready and those which are just complying with earlier regulations. Tom, could you kick us off on that and just tell us what the sort of key differences are?

That essentially means that new homes will have no gas and no fossil fuels, and typically they are then all electric. And typically they will have a heat pump for their heating and hot water. They'll have a hot water cylinder, which is a big change.

That's a big spacial requirement. 600 millimetre diameter, big hot water tank. Most people know what that is. And then they'll also have PV.

So there's a functional requirement for PV, solar panels and pretty much the whole roof. It's actually 40% of the ground floor area. So those two, I'd say are the biggest ones. There's then a few other minor kind of ventilation tweaks.

And on part F, some will have to have MVHR heat recovery ventilation, some just Extract ventilation. And there's other bits around the future homestead, around EVs, which is a separate regulation, and other bits around smart controls.

Okay, and how does that affect the customer journey? I mean, why is that customer journey going to be different going forward?

Yeah, I think this is the point of the piece.

We found that when you introduce different technologies, not actually complex, but different technologies into the home, that is quite challenging for our culture, for both how you design, install, commission and then use it. And so there is a challenge there for people coming into a new home, whether they're renting or buying it, to understand the technology.

Not to the point where they know how it works, that's not the point, but just how they operate it, whether they need to change any of the thermostats whether they need to have a smart tariff for the PV, things like this, the basics of use they need to understand. And that is surprisingly challenged for a culture that has been used to gas for many decades before.

Okay, great. And Katie, you're a housing association, so you're seeing these issues live. How long have you been not building houses with gas?

That learning started with the contractors in terms of getting them on board, kind of even before that customer journey came into the fray. I think given that was about two and a half, three years ago, we are now seeing the very first homes.

It's really picking up that delivery of homes that we've got customers moving into with no gas.

And so we are in a position now to really start identifying the trends and the impact it's having on the customer journey and actually the colleague experience. As our landlord, we've got a lot of colleagues who interact with customers in these homes.

And when are you interacting with customers?

For a housing association with a footprint like ours, that looks really different, even depending on where in the country we are letting that home. So we typically will let homes through a local authority and through their letting system.

And so, as you can imagine, local authorities have got a very different approach in different parts of the country.

So even down to how we advertise, how many words we can use to advertise a home, how much information we can provide about a home at the point of allocation varies really significantly. So we do do as much as we can to standardise that and make sure that we're setting expectations from the off.

But that interface happens all the way from the point of allocation.

Thinking about affordability of a home, thinking about the household, of the people who'll be moving into the home, people typically will be able to go and visit the home before they actually move in on account of it being a new build. There's no one already in there. They can go and have a look and then that does - then that relationship comes all the way through handover.And then we've got dedicated aftercare and defect teams as well.

What we find is, depending on the customer, the way that they want to communicate us varies quite significantly.

So we'll have customers who don't want to speak to us at all if they can help it, as typically somebody with a Private landlord may want to. We've got customers who are much more comfortable picking up the phone.

And so the hub, our customer contact centre is probably still the number one point of contact for customers ringing to report that they've got a challenge or a question. We've got a really brilliant team of neighborhood officers who are really present, particularly in new communities that we're building.

So they get a lot of that face-to-face interaction with dedicated operational individuals and then we'll have digital channels as well.

So we've got to ensure that we're able to provide the right advice and the right information through all of those channels from scripting and training for colleagues in the call centre through to neighbourhood officers. And that neighbourhood officer would be somebody in housing operations who'd probably be asked to go into the home and look at the kit physically.

So making sure that they've got the right information and the right training and the right skills all the way through to then those digital channels and just having how-to guides available on the website.

Okay, and Tom, I know you're working with people across the piece. How are you seeing these changes coming through in the way that companies are, are talking to customers, and communicating?

It's happening across the board, as you said. It's happening quicker than I think expected. Although I'd still say the status quo is to be reactive and we're not seeing this - this isn't everywhere.

You know, I think people are still talking about introducing things like quick start guides or QR codes or resident portals. It is starting to happen, but good practice isn't everywhere yet. And it's starting to change the levels of handover.

And I think the benefits of this is that if get the handover right and if you get that first few weeks right, you will massively minimise your callbacks, your issues in the front and then actually going up the chain.

If you then do some post-occupancy evaluation in the back end, you got a chance to impact your design and development, your employee's requirements, your briefing, your designs to the better. So you design out these problems. You know, at the moment traditionally we're not learning from residents.

You know, the architects, designers, development teams aren't visiting site in use, they're not speaking to residents. They don't hear how their homes are performing, how their designs are performing.

That's why housing is very different from product design, say, so to close that gap is really important and that's why we need housing associations who are invested in the management and maintenance to kind of help us feed that back into contractors and some of the examples we've had in the guidance that we've written, some of it is really good practice examples about local authorities, housing associations, leading 360 reviews with contractors, and their design teams and presenting the resident feedback to them and then finding out, okay, well how do we fix that? What's the solution to the heat pump problem, depressurisation, or HIUs in flats, or overheating, or a number of problems?

We get feedback or underheating or energy bills. What's the solution? How can we change that?

That's the really exciting thing is you get this right, you'll minimise cost in mid and long term and you'll improve your designs and offer for residents.

Ok. And you've led me into all sorts of things I could ask you more questions about. But I suppose the first one I would say is you mentioned guidance. Where can we find that guidance?

Yeah, so this has been co produced between the Good Homes Alliance and the Future Homes Hub. It's on the Future Homes Hub website. It's in the knowledge centre. Go there, you'll get the latest guidance, a renter's guide, hints and tips.

And there's also a guide for new builds as well, isn't there?

There's a guide for new build that we did last year.

So this is really building on that and emphasising the differences between renters and buyers and they are quite significant, possibly take that for granted. But in terms of the fact that it's allocated and it's not buyers buying into the property, so that's often quite different.

Sometimes there's this feeling that tenants get forced into it or not forced, but they don't have an option, do they? They don't buy into it. That's very different. The allocations is very different.

The handover, there's quite a lot of crossover there in terms of how to do a good handover, but then that ongoing support is obviously then very different. That's led by the landlords themselves and then the aftercare post occupancy evaluation. We're seeing lots of crossover.

However, in this guide we're seeing more and more landlord clients investing in post occupancy evaluation studies and build performance evaluation as well, to really test their product and their offer - the design, not just what the resident thinks about it, but in terms of how it's technically performing. And then the social side and the economic side out of the bills and things like that. You can go out and measure relatively cheaply now.

So getting ahead of things like Awaab's Law, overheating issues issues, low energy bills for fuel poverty and impacting their designs. So, yeah, both guides are out now. Go and check them out.

Yeah, okay.

And I want to ask you some more stuff about post occupancy evaluation, but I just wanted to ask Katie first a little bit about, you know, I mean, I guess you might regard this as post occupancy evaluation, but what feedback are you getting from your customers? What's the number one thing that hits your switchboard when people are saying, I'm in a new home, I've got an issue?

I would say that customer feedback is our number one post-occupancy evaluation metric at the moment. It's got to be the most important thing that we take on board.

When thinking about future spec, there's probably three main things that we're finding most often, and luckily for us, they're fairly easy fixes. On new builds, our number one defect reported currently is air source heat pumps.

So that is a new thing directly on the back of that change in specification we made two and a half, three years ago.

It's also our number one repeat defect report, which means a customer doesn't feel that it's been resolved the first time once it's been closed, but really within that.

And what the granular detail is showing us is that more often than not, it's actually a really simple fix and something that we could probably get people more comfortable with if we got this process that's within the guide right.

Is that a really simple fix for the customer to do themselves or is it a maintenance issue?

Ideally we'd want - so the challenge is often with just a depressurised air source heat pump.

And so those of us who are really familiar with boilers and have lived in homes with gas boilers our whole lives are quite familiar with either doing it ourselves or just watching a really simple YouTube video on how to repressurise a boiler.I did it myself last week.

And I think with a new technology and there's been lots and headlines around heat pumps, they're talked about a lot in the press and in the media.

And it is a new that customers who aren't as familiar with them or not as confident of reporting something as a defect that is probably quite fixable at home themselves.

So we've got some really strong manufacturer partners who address that because it is a really known problem, very simple to fix with hotlines and advice over the phone. So that's number one.

And I think the guide that Tom's worked on with the hub and the Good Homes Alliance will support in from the like very beginning from that lettings and allocations phase.

Just demystifying this technology so that customers are probably more confident and able to access information online about how to fix some of these things that are fairly highly occurring themselves from the beginning. The second is around installation and around the cost associated with running a home that doesn't have gas in it.

So what the regs will do is ensure that homes have got solar panels on.

So that will address a lot of the challenges we're seeing so far with going all-electric, not having a gas boiler due to the cost of energy currently.

And then we're also doing quite a bit of work with our contractor partners on how we can address the cost of running kit through better quality installation. And that is just through landlords as clients of contractors ensuring that we've got the right skills in house.

And linked to that in terms of cost of running this kit for customers is then giving our customers the right advice on how to live in the home. And that's point number three really is managing expectations.

So linked to cost we also hear about the comfort and the temperature of the home.

And again through following this guide and some of the best practice embedded in this guidance is ensuring that customers understand the difference between a home that would be traditionally on a gas boiler and you can ramp up the heating when and where you want and having to operate a system that's on a more ambient temperature and understanding that, A, so living in the home differently, running that home differently, but then also accessing the right tow tariffs that ensure that you're not just on kind of a standard tariff that somebody on in a home with a gas boiler may be on and having a tariff that's appropriate for the home and the technology that you've got in that home.

We talked about heat pumps there. I mean a number of other things that have changed in the Future Homes Standard spec or the requirements for the future, for the new Part L. So things like solar panels and different ways of ventilating the homes. Do you get any issues with those or are they minuscule in comparison?

I'd say they're miniscule in comparison.

I think the number one thing that a customer notices particularly as their first winter kicks in, if they've moved in maybe kind of height of summer, is what that home feels like in terms of it in terms of its heat. And it's also the biggest outgoing for a household after their housing and rental costs is that energy cost to the home.

Okay, now I quite like to ask a question about topping and tailing. So both in terms of conversations to be had and access to information prior to occupation and then talk about post occupancy evaluation.

So what are the key messages that you're communicating at Platform to people before they come into these new homes?

So the key messages before moving in are typically harder to land, we find, because before moving in there is so much legwork involved in kind of affordability checks and in terms of tenancy agreements, background checks, everything else that I would, I think admittedly when looking at this end-to-end guide and all the stages, I think that's probably where I'd say Platform has got. We're going to be incorporating the Guide in the work that we're doing designing that customer experience.

So a lot of the information around componentry is at the point of handover. That kind of home familiarisation.

And what the work that, that Tom has done and this guide has done is demonstrate that if you can incorporate that and weave that much further upfront, you do address some of the kind of - it's the excitement of first days getting the keys and customers often just want to know where does, where's the sofa going to go?

Yeah, well, I think we may have cued Tom up there.

So Tom, what's in the guidance about talking to people about stuff before moving in or before or even before they're thinking of going for that particular property at all?

Yeah, I think some of the landlords who've contributed to the guide mentioned that they make a, a point of phoning applicants.

So once you've received the application, they phone them just to make sure that they understand the property is off-gas, the nature of that. So everything from it's not going to have gas cooking, they'll have an electric cooker, induction hob.

And the benefits of that, you know, safety benefits of not having gas in the home, both in terms of the air quality but also fire risk. So it's really as simple as that, like making sure they understand the technology. It's going to be a heat pump, making sure they understand that.

PV panels make sure they understand and that they're kind of up for it. You know, the last thing you want is a, I don't know, a type of resident who's not going to want that sort of technology.

So they need to buy in with that.

I think, as Katie said, making sure that's in line with the Tenancy Agreement, make sure that's clear in the tenancy, make sure it's clear in the advert that the EPC has shown and it's. The technology is there. They know it's going to be a heat pump, PV home.

Probably after that you could probably leave it to, to hand over day, you know, because as Katie said they're so stressed and busy up to that point. Handover day is then still quite stressful.

So you do the basics then and, and we had some of the, you know, Peabody for example have created a one-page quick start guide which I think is really sensible to the home.

Pick out the key points and then follow it up multiple occasions after that depending on the resident you might have to another in person visit, visit let's say seven days afterwards, five to seven days afterwards. And then, it might then be you just have a portal or a digital home use guide as well as the physical one.

Or maybe you need further follow up visits in the winter when, when you know the, the heating season started. So it will need to be flexible.

And I think when we were talking earlier, Katie made the point that the guide we've written is really a template and it gives you some examples. It's hints and tips.

It's really over to each organisation now to map this up against their own customer journey, map their own customer journey and take what's appropriate for them. There's some great examples from a range of landlords in the guide so hopefully that inspires people to go out and do better.

And I guess this is just a natural extension of the relationship that the association would seek to have with its clients already.

A new build - I guess maybe, is it saying "well actually we need to take some lessons from the rental sector" and transfer them into the build for sale sector in terms of a bit more of an ongoing conversation?

I think the temptation for a private developer is building for sale and then selling and then that's it essentially beyond, beyond the possibly warranty period is that you have a long term investment in these properties and so there are lessons learned, you know, the other way.

And I think the best developers will take these on board because they want to build better homes, you know, and they feel the duty to build better quality homes and homes that residents will be able to use really well, be optimised for each individual case. So good developers will do that.

In the research for this guide, these examples we posted here, they aren't everywhere and we did actually find quite a lot of both private developers and landlords really struggling with this and especially that handover issue. And in use people just not getting it. And tariffs was a big one.

They weren't signed up to the right tariff in the first year. So they went a whole year without having any benefit from the PV export. They could use the PV energy but not export it. And that's quite a common one.

Yeah, yeah. We talked a little bit about post occupancy evaluation. In many ways I think we increasingly understand what that looks like.

But I'm aware that there's been a lot of change on the technology side for post occupancy evaluation.

As my penultimate question, I just wanted to ask you how's that changing the way that we look at post occupancy evaluation and the type of evaluation we're doing over and above what would have been, you know, interviews I suppose .

To answer that question directly - yes, the technology cost of meters and monitors have come down rapidly. So it used to be thousands of pounds per home, now it's a few hundred if that.

And arguably if you get this into the contract at the right point, this can be cost neutral. You know, the heat pump provider should be providing it should. We'll be monitoring this anyway. The heat meter, they'll have access.

PV supply will have the inverter data. So if you ventilation supply will have quite often have a monitor there.

So if you can get it in the right time and have either a smart home management or an overall device, there's various devices out there. It can be £100 or £200 per property. So the technical side of monitoring the air quality energy is coming down a lot.

They're subject but they are the best monitor.

So if you can understand and benchmark, and this is why it's really exciting working with the Good Homes Alliance on how do we standardise that data and we're building a standard questionnaire that can be used across housing associations and landlords and developers and homeowners to benchmark, what do the residents' data mean and how good is that and what does that then how does that impact your design and your offer?

Okay, well this is the point when I ask my last question in the, in the podcast. I like to pretend that I can grant you wishes. I don't really have that power. And I don't even grant you three wishes. I only grant you one each.

And that is, what is it you would like people to take away from this podcast, from this area about owning the customer journey? What's the one thing you'd like them to take? Katie, I'll start with you.

Oh, what a question, Chris.

I think what we need to understand above all else when we have this conversation and we use - language matters, we talk an awful lot about building houses, we talk a lot about units in the sector. It's something that particularly in my team, we work really hard to make sure we know. We talk about, we're talking about homes and people's homes.

And so ultimately, we touched on this earlier.

But understanding our customer and understanding what that end to end customer experience looks like and what the potential points of failure are and where we can intervene. And Tom's talked a lot about that post occupancy and all of those ways that we're able to identify opportunities to improve.

And so I think if there was one thing, it would just be about centring people.

There's a lot of talk about technology, there's a lot of talk about regulation, awful lot of talk about construction, but it's about meeting people where they're at and making sure we're providing the right information in the right way that empowers them to live in their homes the way that they were designed and built to be.

Okay, great, Tom, beat that.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

You're just going to have to have a not quite so good point, Tom.

So, yeah, I, at risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm not going to say POE. What I'm going to say is engagement. And it's kind of building on Katie's point.

I think, all too often, we are reactive in this industry and we react to either snagging or someone phones is up or a problem and that's too late in other industries.

You look at iPhone, you look at phones, they have been designed to be proactive and just work and people don't - you don't have to have a home user guide to your phone, do you? Just, you just. And they, they're just brilliant things that everybody intuitively understands.

And that's actually cross culture and cross age group, you know, across ages. They work. We should be looking at homes and design and delivery in the same way. They just need to work.

It shouldn't be a problem for a home heat pump. It shouldn't break down. It shouldn't.

So that would be my key message. Let's get these lessons based from engagement, based on findings from whether it's a visit, a home visit where you get some feedback or if it's actually a technical piece of research. Get those findings back into the industry development. And as I said, the Good Homes Alliance have been championing that for decades now.

We really want to see big change happen at scale now, not just on small projects. So my one final plea for everybody listening to the podcast is don't think that POE building performance duration is this big expensive thing.

It's not. It's become very cheap now, very easy to build into your existing processes.

On handover, you can just include this in your handover, include this in your one year review, in your tenant satisfaction measures, asking a few more questions, that can be it.

And then the smart meters can give you the data and work with universities, work with consultants out there to tell you what that means and come and share lessons with groups like this.

Brilliant. Okay, two wonderful five-star answers. Thank you again.

Thank you, thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Future Homes podcast and thanks once again to Tom and Katie.

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