What Is Service Design and Why It Matters to Housing

A tenant reports a leak. She uploads photos, explains she has a young child, and flags that she is worried the ceiling might collapse. A week passes. She hears nothing. She chases - online, by phone, in person. The repair team eventually come out, leave her some buckets, and advise her to keep containing the water. More of the ceiling falls. The light fittings fill up with water. She is told the flat is still liveable. The hotel she is offered is miles away and she does not drive.

From the organisation's perspective, the process was followed. The case was closed. And yet the experience failed - completely.

That gap between what a landlord thinks it delivered and what a tenant actually felt is, as Oliver Goldring puts it, customer experience. And it ended up in the media.

In the first session of the Social Housing Round Table's new People and Culture stream, Matt Baird is joined by Oliver Goldring, Head of Digital, Design and Communications at Magna Housing and author of Listen, Act, Change, for a candid and practical conversation about service design - what it actually is, why the sector has normalised poor design without realising it, and what it would take to genuinely change.

The conversation covers the difference between process mapping and customer journey mapping, why so many organisations are confusing the two, how technology has come to define services rather than support them, and what Oliver calls the uncomfortable truth: that in housing, there are thousands of Sarahs because services were never designed to actually work.

Big thank you to Alertacall Ltd for sponsoring The Social Housing Round Table, without them, none of this would be possible.