On Monday 27th April we are opening up a new Lab concept about how we deal with issues relating to damp and condensation.
It's not the sexiest subject but it's one that affects a lot of customers and takes up colleague time. If it's a problem for customers and also wastes money it's ripe for a bit of innovative thinking.
The problem of damp in properties was brought to the forefront by Lichfield blogger Bessy Banks. In a provocative series of posts Bessy outlined the effect of living in damp conditions on the lives of a group of residents and kickstarted a campaign to do something about it.
We put our hands up and admitted we were late to see the extent of the issue. By dealing with customers on an individual basis we had failed to join up our intelligence sufficiently.
The Bessy Banks campaign was instrumental in shaping how we'll look at neighbourhood data in the future.
The work in Lichfield is pending evaluation (we won't really be able to test the results until the winter) but we want to take a much wider look at the issue.
- How many customers are really affected?
- Is this a property issue or more around lifestyle and behaviour? Or both?
- What role does fuel poverty have in this?
- How would we tackle this if we started again?
The concept will kick off at 2:30pm Monday with an initial problem framing session. We'll be sharing some of conversation on Twitter and also live blogging here on the Lab site.
After this exploratory session we'll breaking the problem down into smaller chunks - and this is where we really want to get customers involved. If you'd like to help us please leave a message here or via the contact form. Or send us an email on Lab@Bromford.co.uk.
**************** Update ****************
Hi Everyone,
We've held the session now - had great colleague engagement and found a way to use google docs for live blogging. Amy has been tidying up the session notes - you can find them <here>, on our website.
I've pulled the information I can, along with a few suggestions for immediate work (purple text), into an executive summary - attached <here>. If you have any thoughts or recommendations, get in touch on thomas.hartland@bromford.co.uk. We'll be meeting with Fiona (Customer Advocate) today. I'll update the diary with decided actions.
Thanks,
Tom