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Section 3 Issues and concerns in research and consultation

3.20 Using information and communication technologies (ICT) to gather service user feedback

There is growing use of ICT in the social housing sector. Most ICT initiatives are concerned with improving service delivery. There is some use of ICT to promote tenant participation and limited use for the purposes of gathering service user feedback. Landlords have, for example, provided service users with Internet access via computers to enable their use of email, websites, discussion forums, bulletin boards, chatrooms and other web-based activities.

Whilst this situation is likely to evolve over time, effective and successful use of ICT to gather feedback from service users is unlikely to be a clear-cut task. This is due to two principal reasons.

• Access to the web and e-mail is still relatively limited amongst social housing residents. The scope may vary depending on the service user profile and is likely to change over time.

• Many research and consultation methods do not lend themselves to use online.

Although web access may be limited ICT offers scope for reaching hard-to-reach groups, for example the use of text messaging with young people. With permission, this might be useful as a reminder to pay rent, to attend an appointment or respond to a postal survey, but it is unlikely to be an appropriate medium to gather user views in its own right.

There may be scope to use ICT as a way of administering surveys or receiving complaints. Online customer feedback forms can be used to gather feedback from service users, but to use this data appropriately a rigorous administrative system is needed to ensure that multiple online responses by the same person are detected and that online responses and paper-based responses are not double counted.

Research fatigue leading to low response rates to paper-based satisfaction surveys and other data gathering techniques is unlikely to be countered by attempts to gather data online. Many of the inherent difficulties of questionnaire based research such as the use of structured questions and the inability to control who exactly completes the questionnaire are not addressed by the use of ICT. Some service users, particularly those with little experience of using computers, may feel that responding to an online questionnaire is too difficult or time consuming or may be concerned about data protection and confidentiality. Some people may simply have a preference not to use ICT at all.

Online surveys have the appeal of administrative convenience, but it is difficult to control the sample selection and they are likely to of very limited use with probability samples.

Some qualitative techniques, such as in-depth interviews and focus groups, do not easily lend themselves to administration in this way.

It is likely to be worthwhile for a social housing organisation to know about access to the web and email amongst its service users and to consult on attitudes to its use in service delivery and gathering service users’ feedback.

Practice point

Ask service users how they wish to be consulted and whether they are happy to respond to web based or other methods that use ICT.

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