Bromford LAB

Home Maintenance Coach

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; however customers don’t always feel suitably equipped with the information, skills, will, confidence or tools to enable them to do so. Home Maintenance Coach built upon both the concept of customer skill, will and confidence which we had explored through customer personas and evaluation of the Starting Well Engineer pilot. Through a short and flexible test we wanted to provide a more bespoke service offer which was more aligned to the localities coaching model.

Actions: We used learning gained through the Starting Well Engineer pilot, output from a discovery workshop we facilitated with key stakeholders, and our own qualitative research gathered through customer interviews to develop our understanding of the problem. This lead us to think about home maintenance less in terms of a single service offer, and more in terms of a platform for different types of service.

With the assistance of a Neighbourhood Coach, a Home Maintenance Coach (engineer) worked with customers to help them achieve a set of objectives which were decided upon together. We wanted to understand what skills our customers have that they could use to help others in their communities and what role Bromford should play in facilitating that network. Unlike a pilot which usually runs for a period of 12 months or more and must remain unchanged throughout, we wanted to approach this test as a dynamic learning opportunity, run over a shorter period of time, and able to change and flex on a regular basis in line with what we were learning on a day-to-day and week-by-week basis.

The objective of the Home Maintenance Coach test was therefore to inform future decision making in relation to the home maintenance/repairs service offer, rather than testing a specific model for rollout. The test had the following remit:

• Work with new customers, where this is the first tenancy to identify if they require;

• support or coaching to ensure they can maintain their home to the expected standard;

• Work with customers who might be at risk of damaging or neglecting their property or have already caused damage to their property to ensure they can maintain their home to the expected standard and also prevent any future damage;

• Work with new/existing customers who may have the will to improve their home but don’t have the skills to do so, with the aim of providing them with the confidence to carry out some improvements themselves.

Outcomes: A key takeaway from this work was understanding that defining what we mean by ‘looking after’ a home is quite difficult and deciding which customers should be able to do which type of task was practically impossible. Several questions remained unanswered:

• Do we mean every customer? Do we understand our customers enough to know who?

• Do we expect customers to leverage the help of friends, family and contacts? What is reasonable?

• What repairs do we want customers to attempt? How do we know that these are the right things?

Next Steps: Whilst someone may not have the skill, will or confidence to attempt a fix themselves this time, next time they might be in a different place. We want to explore whether providing all customers with self-help guides at the point they report the repair could provide them with the opportunity to decide themselves whether they have the skill, will and confidence to attempt it. By also providing a facility for customers to give the reasons why they don’t feel able to tackle the repair themselves, we will be able to generate intelligence and insight to enable us to develop new types of user-centred support; these might include iterations of starting well, home maintenance coach or our handy-person service alongside entirely new services which we haven’t yet thought about.

For more information relating to what happened next, please take a look at the following case study - Online Repairs Reporting

Blog Posts:

Coaching Skill, Will and Confidence - July 2019

Home Maintenance Coach: Starting to Uncover What We Have Learned - March 2019

How might we support customers to play their part in looking after their home? - February 2018