Livv Housing’s executive director of customer insight, Sharon Marsh highlights her priorities for the organisation’s new portfolio, and what “doing more” means for the Knowsley-based G1 V1 business
You could say I’m Livv-ing a professional career dream; I’m proud of the contribution I’ve made to the resources portfolio at Livv Housing Group over the past four years, helping to create a culture of positivity and pride in our G1 V1 business.
We sit as an employer of choice in the region. We’re committed to recruiting people locally, and to creating opportunities for those people to grow careers and professional prospects as part of us, with 480 employees in those ranks.
We’re creating social impact at scale – impact that’s helping to counter the heaviest of challenges that our communities are facing. Post covid, we’ve lurched from a global health crisis into a cost of living crisis, with fuel and food poverty creating a period of challenge and uncertainty that I believe it’s fair to say we’ve never seen, nor had to weather, before.
It’s against this backdrop that I’m incredibly passionate about taking on the portfolio of customer insight. And to continue my professional journey with a business that’s genuinely committed to gathering intelligence and acting on what it says.
We’re committed to delivering services shaped with, and for, our customers with ongoing engagement part of our organisational DNA.
This means listening to, valuing, and acting on customers’ feedback to inform our decision making. It means doing more to exceed expectation and being transparent about our performance. These are the genes to ensuring we achieve the right impact, in the right places, at the right time.
Real time data – real-time change
So, it’s about gathering real-time intelligence that we can listen to in real-time to make the kinds of changes our customers are telling us about now – in a contemporaneous timeline, not two years too late!
Historically, social housing can be a sector that moves slowly; an oil tanker turning at sea. But we want to move with more pace and agility at Livv. We want to be the social housing ‘speedboat’ – able to zip and nip – to pivot approaches and systems in a timeline that’s meaningful not meaningless – because it just missed the boat.
We’re using 80,000 sets of real-time data through Qualtrics to bring a sense of the consumer culture that we typically see outside of our sector, in retail for example, into social housing.
This will help further improve our customers’ experience of interacting with us, alongside the introduction of Accuserve, to continually better the relationship; something we all stand for, together, at Livv.
Doing More
I’ll be focussed on delivering the exciting objectives Livv has documented in its new corporate plan spanning 2023-26 entitled Doing More.
What does doing more translate to by way of goals?
By 2026, we’ll be consistently achieving 87% overall customer satisfaction, have 90% customer ease, resolve 90% of initial complaints within 10 working days. And we’ll be able to evidence how our customers’ feedback has helped us to make informed strategic choices, and improve our services.
I want to continue to ensure we’re supporting our 28,000 customers through the cost of living crisis, and bringing new initiatives through that further benefit our customers’ mental health and well-being.
It’s about doing more, being more for our customers by hearing their voice and making the right changes powered by insight, data and the commitment of the dedicated teams that make up the customer insight portfolio; fantastic and enthusiastic people in the sector that I’m delighted to be working shoulder-to-shoulder with, and to be taking on the leadership of.
This is an exciting professional period, I’ll be looking at the Livv that I’ve loved being part of through a new lens. That means being ready to do more for our customers, to shape what we deliver and how we deliver it for them, to build on our successes, and lead step change in our insight harvesting.
And in turn, I’m looking forward to welcoming in a new leadership team colleague, to build on my tenure in the executive director of resources role and to bring forward their vision for the portfolio to help take Livv to its next bold and brilliant chapters.
Main image: Sharon Marsh is executive director of customer insight at Livv Housing
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