Customer Experience Strategy

Introduction and Purpose

The overall purpose of our revised Customer Experience Strategy is to set out a framework for delivering One Manchester’s customer experience (CX) and to embed a customer first approach.

The strategy takes into account what we have achieved over the previous two  years, where we need to focus over the next two years, and what must deliver on in term of increasing regulation and legislation that remains prescriptive. One Manchester’s aspiration of being a truly customer first organisation, delivering a best in class service, remains and us evident within our action plan.

Throughout 2024/25 and 2025/26 extensive work was carried out to collaborate, engage, and co-create with our customers. This insight, combined with our TSM and complaint data gives us assurance that the key principles of this strategy remain relevant throughout 2026/7 and 2027/8.

Since the introduction of the first strategy we have developed and implemented a customer voice framework, and currently have 170 engaged customers who generously share their time and insight with us. Our engaged customers have co-created our new welcome pack and service standards with us, and have helped shaped decisions around procurement, strategies, and policies.

It has also been fantastic to see consistent improvement in our tenant satisfaction measures (TSM’s) culminating in 75.9% overall satisfaction with One Manchester in 2025/26. Beyond this we have seen increased satisfaction across 11 of 12 perception measures. 

Measures relating to respectful and helpful engagement have continued to improve, with satisfaction around keeping customers informed rising by almost 9% over the last 2 years. 

We were delighted to receive a rating of “C1” in our 2025/26 regulatory inspection, with the regulator recognising that One Manchester manage complaints fairly, promptly, and effectively and provide meaningful engagement opportunities for customers. 

This updated strategy builds on past successes to continue to act on customer insight and deliver an improved customer experience to all customers. 

Key Principles

The 5 key principles of the strategy are:

•    Insight for action: To understand our customers, and our customers’ needs, we need to collect the right data and, crucially, ensure we use this insight to drive action. 
•    Know our customers: If we understand our customers’ we can deliver the right inclusive services.  
•    Culture & Behaviour - Customer First: We want the culture at One Manchester to be customer centric. 
•    Continuous Improvement: It is important we learn from feedback and adapt and tailor our services around customer needs.
•    Be the Best: We always want to deliver best customer experience in all that we do, looking inside and outside of sector to learn from the best. 

What we know about Customer Experience currently

CX is the view formed of One Manchester by our customers perception of every interaction with us; it’s the way our customers feel about us beyond any transactional activity. The CX strategy will ensure that CX continues to be at the heart of everything we deliver and not simply something that is  “nice to have.”

Service design and service delivery without understanding the CX can lead to poor service delivery, service blind-spots, and higher costs to serve. Understanding, and improving on, our CX leads to a wealth of positive benefits including a more inclusive service, improved customer satisfaction (CSAT), a reduction in complaints/ complaint escalations, lower customer effort, and increased engagement through increased trust.

We continue to operate in a challenging environment. Our customers remain impacted by the cost of living as well as political tensions locally and globally, and housing associations are subject to increased compliance with evolving law and regulatory requirements around hazards, safety, and competence - all of which have resource and cost implications. Despite this we continue to prioritise CX.

We view CX as much wider than “customer service”; the value of CX comes from identifying the key expectations of the customer that influence the overall customer experience. Designing and aligning services to make sure  these expectations are met consistently delivers value to the customer, and value for the organisation.

CX is the responsibility of every One Manchester colleague and the success of the strategy is reliant on buy-in from all colleagues. Prior to our initial strategy CX was often viewed as a separate function carried out by a handful of colleagues rather than in integral part of everything we do. Our first CX strategy was successful in shifting that culture and this revised strategy aims to build on that success.

Through continuous monitoring of customer insight (including complaints, compliments, tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) sentiment analysis) and feedback from our engaged customers we have a good understanding of the current CX at One Manchester and what is important to our customers. The primary, or underlying, theme of the majority of negative experiences remains poor communication and because of this communication remains a cross cutting theme.

Being kept updated is so important to our customers who continually demonstrate they want One Manchester to live our values - particularly around honesty and accountability.

This comes out in complaints, TSMs, and many of our customer consultation sessions. Although we have made significant improvements around listening to the customer voice, we are not consistently acting upon it, or delivering expected levels of service, and the strategy action plan reflects this and the work still to be done.

Communication, and updates, make or break to the customer experience and we have seen this reflected in both positive and negative sentiment over the last two years.

Positively, our customers are very generous with their time and insight, and we currently have 170 actively engaged customers who are committed to helping us improve, and holding us to account.

Principle 1 - Insight for action

Data and insight plays a vital role in how we know our customers and is gained from a variety of sources, including:
•    Tenancy experience visits to every customer
•    Complaints 
•    Compliments
•    Consultation & Co-creation events 
•    Customer Scrutiny Panel
•    Engaged Customers 
•    TSM surveys 
•    Customer journey mapping 
•    MP & Councillor enquiries 

In addition to meeting statutory requirements, and reporting on statistics, it is vital that once we have collected insight it is turned into action.

Our customers are giving their time to engage in the complaints process, complete surveys, and attend consultation events so we have a responsibility to ensure we act upon with insight appropriately, and effectively. It is also important that we feed back to customers on how we have listened, and learned, which we seek to strengthen via our customer voice framework over the next two years.

Our approach to Insight for Action means that decisions should be based on customer insight, customer need, and the customer voice. Throughout 2025/26 we consulted over 1000 times across 40 engagement sessions ensuring that the customer voice influenced decision making. We have also completed over 10,000 tenancy experience visits at our customers homes, and carried out regular complaint learning sessions across the business.

Our revised Customer Voice strategy will be co-created with customers in 2026/27 as we apply learning from the last two years to ensure engaging with One Manchester remains a positive and rewarding experience.

The Customer Experience Team will continue to carry out a minimum of 25 customer journey mapping sessions with customers per year to better understand service failure, and pain points,  from a customer perspective. This Insight will be shared with teams across the organisation as part of regular complaints learning sessions to identify service improvements. We know through engagement that customers value this, and we know that our colleagues find this a powerful tool for understanding.

Complaints are a valuable learning tool and as such One Manchester do not actively target a reduction in the number of complaints received by our customers. However, by learning from complaints in 2024/25 we have seen a significant reduction in stage one complaint volume in 2025/26 demonstrating that we have applied learning to improve the customer experience. We remain committed to learning and improving moving forwards.

Our focus on learning from complaints remains and we will endeavour to reduce escalations of complaints by carrying out fair and through investigations at stage 1, providing reasonable redress, and monitoring any outstanding actions through to completion ensuring customers are updated and informed on any next steps.

To strengthen this approach we have developed a complaints learning matrix, introduced complaint triage, and implemented transactional surveys on a sample of completed complaints.

Customers have told us they value fast resolutions, being kept informed, empathy, and clarity in complaints handling which our complaint responses must display, and our refresher training must focus on.

Despite our best efforts to provide excellent service we accept we will not always get this right and complaints are inevitable. When a customer does make a complaint we want to make the experience as seamless as possible and provide a timely resolution. To this end we were pleased to achieve 100% compliance with The Housing Ombudsman complaint handling code in 2025/26.

Tenancy Experience visits remain a priority for One Manchester as an invaluable way of knowing our customers. To date we have carried out circa 11,000 visits and have been able to support customers by raising repairs, making referrals to our Thrive fund, and making referrals to our financial inclusion team.

Customers have told us they value the support One Manchester provides, but are not always aware of what is available so our tenancy experience visits, as well as regular newsletters, and hub drop ins allow us to provide this information.

Principle 2 - Knowing our customers

Knowing our customers is the foundation of our CX strategy. We know that “general needs” does not always equal “no needs” and we therefore have to know and understand our customers better for us to achieve our aim of being a genuinely customer first, and inclusive, organisation.

Great work has already taken place over the last two years to complete our Tenancy Experience Visits. Our Neighbourhoods team also offer face to face contact at community hubs, and at neighbourhood inspections. We will continue to get behind every door to carry out tenancy experience visits at every home, and it is our genuine intent that these visits offer value to our customers and allow us to provide appropriate support rather than just act as an information gathering tool. As such, our approach moving forward will tailor the frequency based on customer support needs.

At the time of publishing our initial CX strategy, our Customer Voice function and framework was in its infancy and our Customer Scrutiny Panel (CSP) were our only regular means to obtain customer feedback and hear the customer voice. The CSP are now well established and have completed valuable scrutiny activity over multiple areas.  We will continue to support and encourage the CSP to act independently to select areas of scrutiny based on customer and performance data and any recommendation they make are formally responded to, and progress monitored, with visibility across the organisation up to Board level.

The work of the CSP is now strengthened by an additional 162 informally engaged customers meaning increased customer voice and increased representation.

Work has also taken place over the last 12 months to ensure we are hearing a representative customer voice and providing the right opportunities to be inclusive via our customer voice framework and this is something we will further strengthen in collaboration with customers via our Customer Voice strategy and framework.

In April 2024 we introduced triaging into our complaints process to ensure we fully understand why our customers are dissatisfied, and what actions we can take to resolve that dissatisfaction in addition to any reasonable adjustments required to ensure the service is fully accessible. This has led to better quality investigations and outcomes, and importantly better quality complaints learning.  We will continue to triage complaints and facilitate complaint learning workshops.

Principle 3 - Culture & Behaviour: Customer First

The success of the initial strategy was reliant on One Manchester and its colleagues adopting a customer first mentality and displaying the correct behaviours to embody this.

Customer insight tells us we are inconsistent at communicating effectively and poor communication leads to dissatisfaction, complaints, and lost trust. We can have the right policies and procedures in place, and carry out the correct actions, but this can be undermined by poor communication and/or behaviours. Communication must be empathetic and tailored to individual customers: it is not one size fits all.

Consistency of service will be strengthen by way of reducing outstanding referrals and monitoring our service standards to ensure we are meeting commitments to customers.

To ensure we are meeting customer need at all times and displaying correct behaviours we are committing to reviewing and refreshing our behaviours framework and collaborating with customers on our approach to the competency and conduct standard.

We have also made positive steps in this direction by co-creating our service standards with customers, and these revised service standards will be implemented in 2026/27.

Through our customer voice framework we will provide meaningful opportunities for customers to influence decision making around services, communication, and policy that matter to them.

Principle 4 - Continuous Improvement

In order to ensure our customer experience evolves with the needs of the customer, and that we apply any learning from both negative and positive feedback it is important that we keep embracing continuous improvement.

We introduced the “customer catch up” and were able to update customers on “you said we are doing” via this newsletter, but we aim to further enhance this with the introduction of a dedicated webpage as part of our enhancements to the customer voice area of the website in 2026/27.

Customers have provided valuable insight in shaping key services and, using that insight, we intend to complete our Homes Intervention to provide a better repairs service and deliver the outcomes of our service charge review.

When the TSM’s were introduced, One Manchester took the decision to go above and beyond with perception surveys, surveying c.200 customers per month. The Insight & Performance team will work closely with the Customer Experience team to ensure that the data across all areas is reviewed on a monthly basis with any emerging themes or declining satisfaction being investigated and tactical initiatives implemented throughout the year. 

We remain committed to providing fair and equal access to our services and as such will measure customer satisfaction on the TSM’s by customer demographics, and impairment, to ensure we provide a fair service, and customer experience, to all customers.

In 2024/25 we were delighted to be recognised by the Housing Ombudsman (HOS) as the social landlord with the most improved maladministration rate, reducing from 74% to 27% against a national average of 71%.  To ensure we continue to learn and improve we will develop training resources of determinations and recommendations of our own and other providers, spotlight reports, gap analysis, and special reports to apply that learning to our own services and complaint handling – proactively reviewing and improving services to align with best practise.

To “future proof” One Manchester and consider our customers of the future we will explore the use of AI and its associated innovations whilst developing a framework around what we will and will not use AI for, keeping customer connection and potential digital exclusion in mind throughout.

Principle 5 - Be the Best

Embracing the previous 4 principles will go a long way in making One Manchester a sector leader in CX but having “Be the Best” as one of our key principles demonstrates our desire to do the right thing by our customers and provide the best possible service out of choice rather than as dictated by regulation or redress.

We were honoured to receive a rating of “C1” in our 2025/26 regulatory inspection. This is the highest consumer rating and demonstrates that One Manchester are making effective use of our systems to identify and address potential issues and areas for improvement. This includes improvements to our stock and the services we provide to customers.

We accept that housing associations are not well known for innovation in the CX space, and as such we want to learn from good practise outside of the sector as well as in. This is reflected in our HEART values as Enterprising.

Being the best is not about the big occasional gestures it is being consistently good at getting the basics right by delivering an inclusive service, creating a positive customer experience, and delivering on promises in order to meet our customers emotional and practical needs.

Being the best at what we do is positive for colleague morale and attracting new colleagues to One Manchester as well as providing our customers with the best possible customer experience. A best in class reputation has other direct and indirect benefits to customers too including commercial opportunities for partnerships and funding etc.

Being the best creates trust and goodwill between us and our customers leading to more positive engagement and understanding if we do get something wrong, as will happen on occasion.

Creating a meaningful contact channels allows us to improve our knowledge and information management, make every contact count and improve the customer experience and this is something we will continue to review and develop in collaboration with customers to ensure that technology enhances the experience rather than replace interactions that customers value.

To demonstrate our commitment to hearing the customer voice, and offering the best possible customer experience we aim to implement the recommendations from our TPAS Smart review over the life of this strategy.

Measuring Success

The success of the CX strategy, and more importantly the experience we provide, will be measured in a variety of ways including:
•    TSM’s
•    KPI’s
•    Complaint volumes and escalations 
•    HOS determinations ad maladministration rate 
•    Regulatory judgements
•    Customer feedback 

The actions within this strategy will be reviewed, updated, and reported to the Leadership Team and Customer and Communities Committee quarterly.

Risks

The key risk to this strategy, as with all CX activity, is that it is seen as the responsibility of a few colleagues in the business rather than as a key part of everyone’s role. This risk is mitigated by way of our customer voice framework and ongoing complaints learning activities.

Key Objectives and Plan

The objectives of this strategy will meet these principles through creating a consistently customer first approach across the organisation.