For me, customer engagement and sustainability go hand in hand, just like landlords and tenants. You can’t have one without the other and it’s all about working together to create healthier, safer, more energy efficient and environmentally friendly homes.
And when it comes to energy efficiency upgrades (or retrofit as it’s more commonly known), it’s really up to landlords to get feet on the ground, speak to their tenants, explain what they’re doing and why – and most importantly, tell them how it will benefit them.
The success of an energy efficiency project depends on good customer engagement. These projects can help to reduce the amount of energy tenants use and make their homes warmer, healthier and more affordable, but they can also be very challenging for tenants and along the way, there are varying degrees of disruption – noise, dust, unsightly scaffolding, plant equipment and works vehicles parked on the street, not to mention contractors working in and around their homes over a prolonged period. So it’s really important that landlords are honest with tenants at the outset about what to expect, and how they can help things to go smoothly.
Many tenants may also be completely baffled by the concept of an air source heat pump or solar panels, when they’ve been used to traditional ways of heating their home, so creating user-friendly materials for the equipment that’s being installed, jargon busters and FAQs also helps to secure buy-in.
Good customer engagement isn’t rocket science. After the initial engagement and introduction to a project, it’s really important to keep the momentum going. Things like having a company rep on site, providing regular project updates (including being open and honest about delays), and following up after the work’s complete to gather feedback and use it as an opportunity to improve all goes a long way to building trust.
While this is relatively straightforward in an urban location that’s easy to access and well served by facilities and amenities, many of the homes that have been identified as most in need of energy efficiency upgrades are in remote, rural locations.
According to DEFRA’s Statistical Digest of Rural England, 9.7 million people live in rural areas - that’s 17% of England’s population. And many of these people are living in older homes that have poor insulation and inefficient heating systems like coal and oil. They have poor energy performance ratings, typically anywhere between SAP band G to D, which means they use more energy and have higher running costs than other homes, making the residents living in them vulnerable to fuel poverty.
A rural location makes logistics more challenging and landlords have to work much harder and get more creative in order to engage with tenants. Yorkshire Housing will soon be starting an £887,000 energy efficiency upgrade project on some of its rural homes in North Yorkshire where there are no facilities, so they’ll be delivering customer engagement sessions with their delivery partner E.ON at regular intervals during the project using a mobile vehicle that’s kitted out with equipment like an air source heat pump. The teams from Yorkshire Housing and E.ON will also be doing some work in the neighbouring nature reserve, things like planting trees and putting up bird boxes – basically being visible and accessible to tenants, to encourage open dialogue and create opportunities for them to ask questions and share their concerns. Of course, technology has a role to play in customer engagement but personal, face-to-face conversations are so important in finding out what’s really going on and building trust and confidence, especially in small, tight-knit rural communities.
There are major concerns about how things are currently working. A growing number of landlords are heavily dependent on communicating with their tenants using text messages and email, and asking them to use online portals to report issues with their homes or to make complaints. But what about tenants who don’t have internet access, or who prefer speaking to a real person? Also, do these online options allow tenants to provide accurate and detailed information, or are they just tick box exercises? Any system, no matter how sophisticated, is only as good as the data that goes into it.
The key is for landlords to ask tenants about their communication preferences, but at the same time, tenants also need to co-operate and give landlords the information they need to allow them to provide the right kind of support and communicate effectively. This information may be personal, such as disclosing medical conditions like being a wheelchair user or having a sight or hearing impairment, learning difficulties or a neuro-diverse condition. But without this, the landlord won’t fully understand the tenant’s situation and be able to adapt its communication, services and support accordingly.
Ultimately, landlords and tenants want the same thing - sustainable, healthy, safe and energy efficient homes. But the road to improving customer engagement and sustainability is a two-way street, and both parties have to be more open and honest - to learn to talk, listen and, most importantly, trust each other.