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Promises, promises

How can you keep customers satisfied if you don't keep your promises? Martin Perry, head of quality, safety and training at construction firm Mulalley, explains how the company transformed their culture and systems to embrace customer care

Most of us would agree that a decent home is one that is warm and weatherproof, and contains modern, safe facilities for cooking, washing and bathing. Such housing is fundamental to the health and well-being of the families that live in them and is a key factor in the development of sustainable communities.

However, as recently as 1997 there were an estimated 2.1m homes in the UK owned by local authorities and housing associations that did not meet this basic 'decent standard'. More alarmingly, these same authorities and associations were facing a backlog of maintenance and repairs estimated to be in excess of £19bn.

While the authorities struggled to provide adequate housing throughout the 1990s, a family-owned and run construction company Mulalley, formed in 1977, was experiencing steady yet unremarkable growth as a constructor with expertise in social housing. However, this all changed in 2001 when the government launched the 'Decent Homes' programme, aimed at raising the standard of local authority and housing association-owned homes. Mulalley saw a remarkable business opportunity in a sector they were experts in - occupied properties.

Nevertheless, the 350 strong staff knew early on that this opportunity could not reach its full potential without changing the way Mulalley did business. So over the next seven years, Mulalley worked to become, in the words of MD Brendan O'Malley: 'The contractor that clients want to do business with.'

And Mulalley's customer-consciousness seems to have paid off. The company is booming - currently it has more than 6,000 properties under contract with around 600 being worked on at any one time. There has also been widespread recognition for its innovative approach. In 2004 Mulalley was honoured by the Queen for helping to improve the lives of people in social housing and presented with the Queen's Award for Enterprise and, later that same year, their efforts in training their resident liaison officer (RLO) teams were recognised by the National Training Awards. In March 2005, Mulalley won their second Quality in Construction Award from Construction News. The judges recognised the changes they had made in the development of the customer care aspect of their RLO programme, saying: 'This company has made a step change beyond recognition.'

As recently as 2007 it picked up the national Considerate Constructor Scheme's 'Most Considerate Constructor' mantle for regeneration and repairs over the last ten years, along with two London Excellence Awards for 'Customer Focus' and 'Making Partnerships Work in Construction'.

But it's more than simply a case of all show and no action. To take the examples of their Croydon contract, Mulalley started as one of two partnering contractors and are now their single preferred contractor. The growth in turnover for Decent Homes work rose from around £16m in 2000 to approximately £60m in 2007 and is set to leap into the region of £120m in 2008-09.

Challenges

Working in occupied properties gives rise to some unique problems for both contractors and residents alike.

Decent Homes work is an intrusive process. As anyone who has had decorators or builders working in their home knows all too well, the nature of stripping out old kitchens and bathrooms, refurbishing rooms and installing new units can completely disrupt a resident's life, home and daily routine.

In the past, this work often led to delays, increased cost, poor contractual relationships and, on occasion, confrontation. The demands of site delivery programmes and the need to be aware of the resident's situation were not always mutually compatible.

Second, the sheer scale of the Decent Homes programme - one-third of all social housing, or 1.6m homes, were 'non-decent' in 2001 - attracted many construction companies, large and small. To rise above the competition, Mulalley realised that it had to offer an outstanding service to differentiate itself. And so began the change in Mulalley's culture, from a traditional construction company to a customer-focused regeneration contractor.

Change in mindset

Led by O'Malley, a working group of the company's most experienced managers was established in late 2000. They asked themselves what it was that they had to do to make their service delivery truly outstanding. The group considered four key service delivery questions:

• what do our clients really want?
• what are other contractors doing?
• what can we learn from other industries?
• what can we learn from our own experience?

While the answers were not in themselves earth-shattering, Mulalley had, like many other contractors in the past, chosen to ignore or disregard their full significance. The simple fact is clients, whether they are councils or housing associations, want satisfied residents.

A shift in service provision objectives meant that customer satisfaction, as opposed to just raw figures and construction targets, were becoming increasingly paramount to a project's overall success. Clients wanted residents' concerns dealt with before they became complaints. While the working group decided that Mulalley was doing no more (or less) than other contractors in addressing client or resident concerns, the working group stated that addressing customer feedback in a more proactive manner was key to achieving success in the new Decent Homes market.

The next step in Mulalley's progress towards a more customer-focused approach to Decent Homes was to closely examine resident feedback on past projects. In many cases residents had expressed the following concerns and frustrations:

• 'If this was your home, would you put up with this?'
• 'Keep us informed, not in the dark'
• 'Deal with our concerns quickly'
• 'Respect our diversity, culture and routines'
• 'We are part of this process, involve us'

This common thread of resident feedback became the catalyst of a major shift in Mulalley's culture and practices. It made the company's transformation into a customer-focused regeneration contractor the most natural and logical path to follow.

Development

Embarking on a new phase of customer service, Mulalley focused on two strategies to achieve higher standards: selecting the right people and developing the right practices.

Selecting the right people was a must. In the past, Mulalley construction managers were the liaison with the residents, but the practice had mixed or very limited success as site managers acting as RLOs caused a conflict of priorities. It became difficult for them to fairly balance the programme delivery targets against the demands the residents made. Something had to give and the programme targets usually won to meet contractual demands.

Instead, the working group decided a 'residents' champion' would more effectively address customer needs, issues and concerns. An ombudsman-like individual who would fight the residents' corner, this person would be 'independent' of any construction targets, yet have a direct line to the managing director and board.

In response to the working group's suggestion, Mulalley created the RLO role. The ideal candidates for this new role did not necessarily have to come from a construction background, but they needed to be a good communicator, a good listener and be able to display compassion and patience in the way they dealt with people. Since conditions on some projects can be tough, it was also important that the RLO was streetwise and could handle themselves in difficult situations.

O'Malley's belief in getting the right people for the RLO role was so strong that, until recently, he personally interviewed each and every prospective RLO. There are currently 38 RLOs, 34 of whom are women, managed by a resident liaison manager and support team.

While finding the right people made an enormous difference to the success of the RLO programme, adding proactive training to the mix was equally important. The RLO training circle was developed to guide and monitor RLO development over three distinct stages.

Stage one - the RLO in training

The RLO trainee is made aware of their responsibilities, their role, the management systems, the qualities they need to demonstrate and the importance of their attitude and appearance. At this level the RLO trainee is always supervised by a qualified RLO and they receive training in:

• condition surveys
• gathering resident information
• company image
• dealing with children
• language line translation service
• using the works monitoring plan

Stage two - the RLO

At this level the RLO has undergone the initial training in stage one and will be mentored by a qualified RLO. They are eventually allowed to work alone on their own contract and their continuing development includes attendance at special courses including assertiveness, self defence and leaseholder issues.

Stage three - the complete RLO

At this final level the complete RLO will have attended all 20 of the training modules and be capable of managing RLOs on other sites.With their experience they become mentors to other RLOs and Mulalley staff. Currently there are 11 complete RLOs in the RLO team.

Practices and procedures

While Mulalley always had a protocol for dealing with residents, the Decent Homes programme led to a major overhaul of that process.This in turn created an opportunity to reap the benefits of greater client and customer satisfaction.

Prior to the launch of the RLO programme, Mulalley's quality, safety and training division and construction management team drafted a series of procedures. Most of these consisted of simple, common sense practices intended to generate mutual respect, clear lines of communication and maintaining health and safety. They included keeping the residents informed, making sure that promises made were kept, personal safety of the RLO, managing access to properties and ensuring residents' concerns were dealt with quickly and effectively.

These were tried, tested and adjusted on resi- dent-in-place contracts before the Decent Homes programme launched. They proved very effective and gave the new RLOs and site production teams a user-friendly set of rules to follow when dealing with residents.

These same procedures are now integrated into the company's ISO 9001 and 14001 systems and practices.They deal with the overall management of resident liaison activities and detailed activities such as:

• conducting resident interviews
• carrying out condition surveys
• dealing with residents' concerns
• managing storage containers
• community events

The practices that Mulalley introduced into resident-in-occupation contracts had a significant impact as well. The practices included:

• placing RLO offices as close as possible to the resident, making the RLO easily accessible, and ensuring they listened, demonstrated they understood the residents' situation and dealt with concerns quickly, meant they soon became accepted by the residents as their 'champion'
• the provision of respite units, so that residents who needed a place of refuge when the construction activities in their homes became too much to bear had a place to go
• creating showrooms with mock-ups of the various kitchen and bathroom options available allowing residents to see and touch the proposed units and fitments before they made their final selection
• providing a playroom with toys and play activities where parents could meet on sites where there was a high concentration of younger children
• developing the resident interview process to gather important information about the residents' situation that could impact on the planning of works - factors such as the health of the resident, their work arrangements, cultural practices and sensitive equipment within their homes. This contributed to reducing the number of failed accesses to carry out the works

A new era of resident satisfaction

In the past, like many of its competitors, Mulalley used satisfaction questionnaires which often asked one single question: 'Were you satisfied with the work in your property?', with space for residents to write comments. As a benchmarking tool, this was far too open and generated irrelevant and unhelpful comments.

Figure 1. Tracking satisfaction

The development of the current certificate of satisfaction in early 2004 became a tool that more accurately measured the residents' assessment of Mulalley's performance. Using 13 carefully worded questions (see figure 1) Mulalley now obtained almost 'real-time' feedback. Using a 'traffic-light' scoring system, the questions were used to identify and correct problems before they became complaints. Since its introduction, the average satisfaction results on more than 15 contracts since 2004 has been consistently above 80 per cent.

Development of tools and initiatives

The need to develop simple tools for Decent Homes work began with a clear early directive from the MD that Mulalley had to change the way it did business. The faith in that directive has never changed or wavered. O'Malley continues to actively encourage new ideas and initiatives from management teams and residents alike.

Mulalley's current works monitoring plan started life as a basic test and inspection plan (TIP). This planning and monitoring tool, first developed by the site management team on a contract at Kingswood Estate in south London, led to O'Malley commissioning a more formal document to be used in the planning and sequencing of work, the identification of works required in properties, the identification and management of occupational therapy assessments, the planning of RLO visits for the resident interviews, greater resident input into the selections of kitchen and bathroom units and other customer-focused initiatives.

This tool, now in a spreadsheet format, is the core document which marshals key resident feedback and data, for the management of both the resident and production activities. It helps Mulalley deliver works in the residents' homes as efficiently as possible.

The 'Am I being considerate?' initiative was launched in 2004 to allow the residents to help us recognise and reward those in our workforce and management team who exceeded normal expectations of service. The resident information book was also developed to help residents understand the exact nature of work being carried out in their homes. Based on the 'plain English campaign' guide this has been translated into a variety of languages and can also be delivered as an audio book.

Keeping residents informed on a continual basis is an important part of the RLO's function. Site hoardings all have resident notice boards providing information including work progress updates, RLO contact details for normal and out-of-hours problems, newsletters and a suggestion box to help improve our service.

In addition, fun days, jobs fairs and community parties, with RLOs either involved in their organisation or in attendance, have become regular events over the last three years on Decent Homes contracts.

Limitations of the system

'The systems and processes are simple, based on common sense'

The systems and the processes that make up the RLO programme, certificate of satisfaction and TIP are simple, based on common sense and current industry regulations, so there are few downsides to this approach. Obviously, high priority is given to ensuring that the right people are hired and trained as RLOs and that site management supports the RLOs in a collaborative fashion, with monitoring and improvements made regularly.

Mulalley has renewed its customer-focused approach to such an extent that one regularly hears the management teams refer to the residents as 'our residents'. For Mulalley, adopting this ethos has not only become integral to good client and customer relations, it has also helped expand our work in Decent Homes and social housing, in a way that would have seemed unimaginable ten years ago. Not only has this quality customer service strengthened existing relationships and built new ones, it has proven to be a dynamic way to improve the lives of residents while remaining competitive.

Martin Perry is head of quality, safety and training at Mulalley. He is a chartered structural engineer with more than 30 years' experience in both the design and construction sectors of the industry. He has worked for clients, consultants and contractors in the UK and overseas. In his current role, he is responsible for managing a team of ten managers dealing with quality, safety, environmental and training systems for Mulalley. He is a fellow of the CQI.