Starting Well Engineer
Description: Every year Bromford experiences a large demand for small every-day repairs. Our engineers often report that many of these repairs could easily be completed by the customer themselves. Through the Starting Well Engineer concept, we set out to answer the question: What if we gave basic ‘training’ to customers to build their confidence in tackling day to day repairs – rather than doing all the repairs for them?
Actions: We lead an initial 8-week iterative learning phase in order to understand more about the problem we were trying to solve and develop a service blueprint we could turn into a pilot. The Starting Well Engineer pilot was launched in February 2017 as a way of reducing repairs but also increasing customer confidence and sense of agency around maintaining their own home. The pilot was conducted over a 12 month period across Staffordshire and The Marches, providing visits to 519 customers within the first 3 weeks of their tenancy starting. We worked closely with colleagues in our Strategic Insight team to ensure that the pilot was robustly evaluated. Following a six month review we decided to undertake a qualitative piece of research to help us understand more about how customers feel about home maintenance and also provide insight to support the final pilot evaluation. We had conversations with 15 customers in their own homes which allowed us to construct a set of real-life user stories through which we gained a more in-depth and holistic understanding of our customers and the relationship they have with their homes. We were also able to spot customer needs we may never have previously considered, identify customer priorities and start to uncover insights around patterns of behaviour.
Outcomes: The results of the pilot we inconclusive. Whilst customers reported positive outcomes we weren’t able to demonstrate that the Starting Well visit had reduced calls to our Customer Service Centre. We learned that often the value customers revived from the visit was in the small jobs that the Starting Well Engineer was able to complete for them whilst he was there. Through the conversations we had with customer during our qualitative research we also uncovered 6 overarching themes around which we were able to frame key pieces of design insight. By far the strongest theme was around skill, will and confidence; customers have different skill, will and confidence ratios depending on the task and what’s going on in their life at the time. We knew that we needed to build upon all of the learning from both the pilot and the research activity in order to answer some of the new questions which we were starting to ask ourselves.
For more information relating to what happened next, please take a look at the following case study - Home Maintenance Coach.
Blog Posts:
Coaching Skill, Will and Confidence - July 2019
What If We Just Let Customers Do Their Own Repairs? - July 2017
Released: Our Starting Well Engineer Concept - September 2016
Hear from the Engineer - Rob's take on the 'starting well' concept - March 2016