Can you tell us a bit about your role and your plans to drive customer experience in 2026?
My job is to make sure we’re not only creating a great experience for our customers but continuously learning and refining. You’ll find me running workshops, mapping customer journeys to remove pain points, introducing performance monitoring, and collecting feedback so we can spot trends and better support our customers.
In 2025, we laid strong foundations, creating service blueprints, and refining metrics. In 2026, the focus shifts to data-driven insights. We’ll be refining our Voice of Customer programme to better listen to what customers think and feel about what we do. This will help us understand their needs and expectations more clearly. We’ll combine these insights with data and create an internal forum where they can be shared and reviewed. From there, we’ll turn them into real improvements that all our customers will benefit from.
What is customer experience and how does it differ from customer engagement or satisfaction?
Customer Experience is the whole journey, how people feel before, during, and after interacting with us.
Satisfaction is a snapshot: “Was this good or bad?”
Engagement is about interaction: “Did they click, call, or respond?”
Experience is the composite of everything; it’s the story customers tell their family, friends and community about us. It becomes part of our brand – the what do they say about us when we’re not in the room.
Your top 5 tips for a great customer experience strategy:
- Start with empathy – Understand what matters most to customers by asking them directly.
- Map the journey – Identify ‘moments that matter’, frustrations, and pain points.
- Measure what matters – What gets measured, gets done! And means you can spot trends and places for improvement too.
- Listen actively – Feedback isn’t a tick-box; it’s the key to improvement.
- Close the loop – Show customers they’ve been heard by making the changes they need and have asked for.
When it comes to retrofit and providing residents with a great experience, what’s the one thing that has stood out for you as most needed?
Communication, it must be effective, coordinated, and consistent from everyone involved. Effective can mean different things for different audiences, so making sure you’re keeping it simple and tailoring the message based on feedback is so important. People have busy lives and have a myriad of competing priorities, the threads of messages from varying sources need to be stitched together so that residents can understand them, and more importantly trust them.
Are there any trends for 2026 that landlords and others in the sector need to consider?
Inclusive Communication: Enhancing provisions for a wider range of requirements is essential to ensure messages can reach everyone. Not one size fits all, people have lots of different needs, and lots of different preferences, we have to make sure we’re doing our best to get the message across to as many people as we can, in a way that’s best for them, not us.
Smarter data use: Utilising the vast array of data already available like complaints, call recordings, and satisfaction surveys, combined with tools such as speech / text analytics to develop a richer understanding of customer views, feelings and requirements. Whilst this won’t replace more traditional satisfaction survey activities, it will alter and enhance the way in which we use the data we collect from them.
Since joining Sero, what has been your biggest learning and what gets you excited for the year ahead?
I’ve loved it. My first 9 months with Sero, and indeed the sector generally has been truly eye opening, inspiring and motivating. My biggest learning has been the extent of complexity and variation within the sector, which has surprised me.
I’m excited about the benefit we can deliver for both residents and landlords, and the potential for learning that will allow us to collectively refine and enhance our offerings further over the coming years.