Ticked the Box, Missed the Point: What Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) Won’t Tell You About Trust
Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) are a welcome step in helping housing associations shine a light on the resident experience. They give you the numbers – the percentage satisfied with repairs, the proportion who feel listened to, the headline on complaints. Useful? Absolutely. But here’s the catch: if we stop at the numbers, we risk missing the bigger truth. TSMs will never tell you why tenants feel the way they do, nor how trust is built (or broken) along the way.
Take the repairs journey. A TSM might tell you that 75% of tenants were satisfied. But unless you dig deeper, you won’t know that many tenants felt anxious waiting for updates, or frustrated that contractors didn’t show when promised. On paper, the repair was “done.” In reality, trust was chipped away.
This is where customer journey mapping makes the difference. By walking through the full experience from a tenant’s perspective – from reporting a repair, to updates, to the person arriving, to follow-up – housing providers uncover those hidden friction points. Suddenly, you see not just the “what” of tenant satisfaction, but the “why.”
I recently worked with a housing team that used their complaints data alongside TSM scores. By mapping the journey, they spotted that tenants were often left in the dark between acknowledgement and resolution. A simple fix – proactive updates at set intervals – led to fewer complaints and a visible uplift in trust. The numbers moved, but more importantly, so did the relationship.
TSMs are a compass, not a destination. To truly improve outcomes, you need to build a rich picture of customer insight: combining survey data, complaints, frontline feedback, and lived tenant stories. When teams bring these sources together, they can design services that feel human, not just efficient.
For Complaints Officers, Heads of Customer Experience, and Insight leads, the challenge – and opportunity – is clear: don’t just tick the regulatory box. Use TSMs as a springboard for curiosity, for conversations with tenants, and for shaping journeys that inspire confidence.
If you’d like to explore how to turn TSM data into trust-building strategies, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch to start a conversation.
Email simon@empathy-transformation.co.uk for tailored coaching and leadership support. Explore more insights in https://empathy-transformation.co.uk/latest-news/
About the author:
Simon Bernstein is a Housing Association Coach & Trainer specialising in customer experience and leadership. He has over 20 years’ experience helping Housing Associations to develop, create and embed a culture which is built around delivering excellence of customer experience at its core. Get In Touch – Empathy Transformation
