Hard to reach, or hard to access?

“Silent majority,” “invisible tenant,” “hard-to-reach customers”. These are all common shorthand for a challenge that all landlords continue to face, but they seem to frame the issue incorrectly. The question we need to be asking is how can we ensure we are making decisions based on the customer voice when we aren’t hearing from large parts of our communities?

First, we need to change the narrative. Labelling customers as “silent” or “invisible” places the burden on them when the truth could be simpler. Often, the issue isn’t that customers are hard to reach; it’s that the landlord is hard to access.

Accessibility is subjective. Whether a customer is vulnerable, a non-native speaker, or simply disillusioned by past inaction, a one size fits all approach doesn’t always work. When you’re supporting tens of thousands of people across diverse communities, we can’t expect one channel to serve everyone.

I’ve worked in this sector for over a decade, and every landlord I’ve met cares deeply about inclusion. While the regulator now mandates evidence of the customer voice in decision making, most landlords were trying to do this long before it was a requirement.

It comes down to two things: making communication easy and listening continuously. Trust is built when a customer speaks up and feels the impact of that interaction. Mistakes happen; what matters is how you respond.

A golden rule: Listen. Understand. Act. Then, listen again.

One of the biggest hurdles today is how to best handle digital engagement. Consider this familiar scenario:

1. Landlord posts on social media celebrating improvements to their repairs service.
2. Customer comments: “That’s great, but what about my boiler that broke six months ago?”
3. The social media team replies: “Thanks for letting us know; we’ll have the repairs team contact you.”
4. The repairs team is overstretched. Days or weeks pass. The customer loses patience and feels let down.

From the landlord’s perspective, the team followed the process. From the customer’s perspective, the process is broken. To turn “invisible” tenants into engaged ones, it’s important to look beyond process, and start delivering presence.

Valleys to Coast are a great example of a landlord that has changed their social channels from broadcast to service. It wasn’t an easy journey, but they identified early that social was a core channel for their customers, however their customer service teams simply weren’t set up to respond well. By taking the time to work collaboratively across departments they have empowered customer service colleagues to give clear, public replies on social media. And customers love it, no slopey shoulders, faster responses and more positive engagement overall. FInd out more here: 

Even with the most accessible contact channels, there will always be people that won’t speak up. For these customers, silence isn’t always a sign that everything’s OK, it’s often a barrier, and if we wait for them to come to us, we’ve already lost the battle.

So, how do we support those who don’t shout?

We can’t talk about proactive listening without mentioning Awaab’s Law. It’s shifted the focus for every UK landlord, moving the conversation from “how do we fix this?” to “how do we stop this from happening?”

Currently, most landlords identify at-risk properties through traditional data like stock condition surveys, age of the building, and historical repair requests. While these are vital, they only tell part of the story. They tell us about the bricks and mortar, but don’t always tell us about the people inside them.

To find the at-risk customers who aren’t calling us, we need to look at the breadcrumbs left in other channels and cross-referencing the data with other sources. Like…

• Social listening: What are people saying about specific estates on public pages?
• Customer service trends: Are there recurring themes that point to a systemic issue?
• Press and media monitoring: If local news highlights an issue in one street, it’s likely the neighbouring properties are facing similar challenges.

If you notice an influx of issues stemming from a specific property type, don’t wait for the next ten residents to report it. Use that data as a trigger. By identifying patterns early, you can take proactive action. Instead of waiting for a repair request, you are knocking on doors asking, “We’ve noticed a trend in homes like yours, can we come in and make sure everything is OK?”

Transitioning from reactive to proactive is about building trust at scale. When you show up at a customer’s door before they’ve reached out, you send a powerful message: I see you, I know your home, and I am here to look after it.

Every landlord is collecting feedback of some sort. Whether that’s to support TSM submissions, consultations or service improvement. Whichever it is, there are two common problems they face:

• For customers, it’s often seen as a tick box exercise – if I share my views, are they really listening?
• For the landlord, it’s often hard to join everything up and get to insight.

There are a number of things we need to get right here; “when and where are we asking for feedback?”,  “how can we ensure that we are able to quickly  act on, or remedy issues from feedback?” and  “how do we join up feedback sources and get to actionable insight?”.

There’s the age old phrase, “if you’re going to ask for feedback, you better do something with it”. Which is a great principle, but in practice, this can be tricky. Especially if you’re struggling for resources, have multiple teams using different tools and don’t have a common methodology. 

The ones doing this well are making feedback easy for customers to give, and making it easy for their teams to action. From a customer side, this is about relevance, simplicity and speed. From the business point of view, it’s about unpacking that feedback and getting insight we can action. 

Centralising your direct surveys, combining that with inferred and indirect feedback from social and press and automating the analysis of that data gives you a far broader view of how customers feel about certain issues. This keeps everything together, saves time associated with manual analysis and cross-referencing sources, and ultimately allows you to focus on making changes that impact resident lives. This is something that Orlo is wholly focused on and we’ve built out our platform to address these issues and make it easy for landlords to not only action feedback, but to evidence how it’s being used. 

You can learn more here: https://orlo.tech/industries/housing/ 

Closing the gap between landlords and the quieter segments of a community is a mindset shift. It requires us to stop waiting for the phone to ring and start looking at the data, the patterns, and the hidden stories.

By making feedback easier, moving away from tick-box exercises and toward streamlined, centralised insight you begin to change from being hard to access and towards being proactively present. Allowing you to go…

• From reactive to preventative: You stop chasing repairs and start managing assets.
• From process to people: You stop managing cases and start supporting residents.
• From noise to insight: You turn a mountain of disconnected data into a roadmap for change.

Ultimately, continuously listening is the one of the best ways to dismantle the “invisible tenant” myth. By acting on what you hear and anticipating what you don’t, you start to build trust in communities. And that trust can open the door to increased engagement.