The ROI of CX for Non-Profit Organisations
By Sarah Sargent – Director of Customer Services, Swan Housing
Listen to Sarah discuss her CX journey, how she challenged traditional gender roles and paved her own way to success despite societal expectation and resistance, and how she now draws upon this personal strength and past experience in order to action CX initiatives within the housing and not-for-profit sector on episode #305 of the Inspiring Women in CX podcast.
The ROI of CX for Non-Profit Organisations
There’s a lot written about ROI in CX. Research by MyCustomer.com last year showed that the majority of CX leaders report using CSAT and NPS to gauge the success of their CX programmes, but only about 33% measure its business value with financial metrics.
The report went on to say that for CX leaders to win the support of their peers in the boardroom, they are going to have to show how their investments in improving customer experience are resulting in quantifiable business outcomes and a positive ROI by, for example:
Increasing top line growth with higher sales, increased cross sales, etc.
Reducing costs – by reducing waste and improving efficiency and effectiveness
Generating higher lifetime value (LTV) by decreasing customer churn and increasing lifetime economic activity
For most organisations in the commercial sector, it’s easy to see the connection between customer experience and the top and bottom lines, but what about the not-for-profit sector, and in particular the social housing sector where things are little bit different?
The most notable differences are:
Social housing residents don’t choose you as a landlord and in fact demand significantly outstrips supply. At last count, there were 1.16m households on official waiting lists for social housing, but the real numbers are thought to be even higher.
Housing associations rely on surpluses from rental and service charge income to fund building new homes, maintaining existing ones, and investing in services and communities. Profit for purpose. To maximise profits, housing associations are focused on keeping rent arrears low and minimising the time that a property is empty.
The sector is under-ever increasing funding pressure as a result of a number of factors, most notably:
Increased costs associated with fire safety. Since Grenfell, housing associations have invested hugely in providing round-the-clock fire wardens in buildings over 18m high, as well as the costs of carrying out the remedial work needed to replace unsafe cladding.
The investment needed to achieve net-zero by 2050, which means as well as building new homes sustainably, also retrofitting over 2m properties across the sector in the next 30 years.
Increases in rent arrears through changes to the welfare benefits and more recently through the Covid pandemic as customers in sectors such as hospitality, retail, and travel suffered major redundancies.
But despite these challenges it is possible to demonstrate ROI from investing in customer experience in the sector.
Here’s how to demonstrate the ROI of CX for non-profit organisations
Reducing cost to serve
As part of regulatory ‘Value for Money’ targets, housing associations are benchmarked against their costs per social rented property, so there’s a clear driver to keep operating costs low.
Reducing costs through automating more manual tasks and giving customers more access to self-service tools to manage more transactional contacts means more capacity to absorb work as new homes are developed, resulting in lower costs per property. Equally, focusing on initiatives that will increase right first time and reduce unnecessary contacts will all support the reduction. This is high on board agendas.
So, although the benefits to customers are obvious – less chasing, better transparency and communication, and more choice – the financial benefits that will satisfy the board are also easy to demonstrate.
Income protection by helping customers sustain their tenancy
Knowing your customers and investing in proactively supporting them with employment, money management, and educational support can help customers maintain their rent payments and reduce the risk of them falling into arrears.
If a 10,000-home social landlord reduces rent arrears by 1% a week, that equates to more than £500k every year that can be reinvested.
The impact on customers is huge, and this is where teams can make a real and positive difference to people’s lives.
Social Value
Not all return on investment has to be financial. Social return on investment is a big part of housing associations’ purpose beyond being a landlord. So, delivering customer experience improvements that impact wider society is hugely important and has additional benefits in creating thriving communities where people take pride in where they live.
The main difference is that the real benefits come from the ability to repurpose any financial returns into building more homes to help reduce the housing crisis, investing in making existing homes safer, warmer, and sustainable, and creating places that people feel proud to call home.
That’s what drives me in my role every day.
Get involved
Listen to Sarah's podcast episode for more on CX in the social housing and non-profit sectors.
If you’d like to get in touch regarding sponsorship, partnership or membership, please send us a message here. We'd love to hear from you!
Bio
Sarah has spent her entire career in customer service and experience, from hospitality and contact centres to leading end-to-end customer experience transformation, primarily in financial services and telco sectors.
Sarah takes pride in delivering service experiences that create business benefits, having led the retention team at O2 to their lowest-ever customer churn and highest-ever customer satisfaction rates, and helping drive cultural change in debt recovery, improving customer engagement and reducing stigma. Working with vulnerable customers during her time in debt recovery led her to want to do more work in the non-profit sector, using her skills and experience in a sector where customers have less choice and where there continues to be stigma.
For the last 18 months she has been working in the social housing sector developing customer experience strategies and using her customer experience knowledge to reshape service models, with customer voice at the heart.