Using Interaction Analytics in Housing Associations

The introduction of Awaab’s Law under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 represents a monumental shift in landlord responsibilities. From October 2025, you will be legally required to investigate emergency hazards like damp and mould within 24 hours, provide written summaries to tenants, and initiate repairs within strict timeframes. Failure to comply is a breach of tenancy agreements, opening the door to legal action and scrutiny from the Regulator of Social Housing. This requires a flawless system for identifying, triaging, and documenting every potential hazard report, including crucial information about tenant vulnerability that may be shared during a call.

The FourNet Solution:

Instantly identify reports of damp, mould, and other hazards the moment a resident calls. AI flags critical keywords, helps triage risk by identifying vulnerable households, and creates an unshakeable, automated audit trail for every case. Ensure you meet Awaab’s Law’s strict deadlines from day one, protect your residents, and eliminate legal and regulatory exposure.

Speech analytics provides the definitive solution for automating compliance and safeguarding residents.

• Real-Time Hazard Detection: During a live call, the system instantly detects keywords such as “mould,” “damp,” “leak,” or “no heating”. It also identifies mentions of vulnerability--such as a resident discussing their children, elderly relatives, or respiratory illnesses--and flags the case for immediate, prioritised action.
• Automated Workflows: A detected hazard can automatically trigger a case in your housing management system, schedule an inspection, and begin the clock on the legally mandated timelines, ensuring no report is ever missed.
• Unshakeable Audit Trail: After the call, every interaction is transcribed, analysed, and stored. This creates a complete, searchable, and time-stamped record of what the resident reported and when. This provides the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman with the exact evidence needed to demonstrate compliance.
• Proactive Intervention: By analysing trends across all properties, the system can identify specific buildings or areas with recurring reports of damp and mould, allowing your asset team to investigate systemic issues before they lead to more hazards.

The Benefit:

For the Board, it provides assurance of compliance with one of the sector’s biggest regulatory challenges. For operations teams, it automates the critical first step of triage and response. And most importantly, for residents, it ensures their health and safety is protected with the urgency the law demands.

The Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) introduced by the Regulator of Social Housing are now the public benchmark for performance. The 12 perception-based measures, covering everything from repairs satisfaction to whether residents feel listened to, are critical indicators of your relationship with your tenants. While surveys provide a score, they often fail to explain the “why” behind the numbers, leaving you to guess at the root cause of dissatisfaction.

The FourNet Solution:

Stop guessing why your Tenant Satisfaction Measure (TSM) scores are low. By analysing 100% of resident conversations, we uncover the true, unfiltered story behind your survey results. Pinpoint the exact drivers of dissatisfaction with repairs, communication, and complaints, and get the data you need to make targeted improvements that genuinely move the needle on the metrics that matter.

Speech analytics goes beyond the survey, analysing the thousands of daily, unsolicited conversations you have with residents to give you the context behind your TSM scores.

• Deep Dive into TSM Themes: The platform automatically categorises every conversation according to the five key TSM themes: keeping properties in good repair, maintaining building safety, respectful engagement, complaint handling, and neighbourhood management.
• Root Cause Analysis: Correlate resident sentiment directly with specific topics. For example, you might see a low TSM score for “satisfaction with time taken to complete repair”. Speech analytics can reveal the true driver is not the speed of the work itself, but poor communication about parts delays or missed appointments, allowing you to fix the right problem.
• Understand Resident Perception: Discover why residents may not feel “listened to” or “treated with respect.” The system can identify instances of poor communication, lack of empathy from staff, or failures to close the loop, providing concrete examples for targeted training and process improvement.
• Validate and Enrich Survey Data: Use the insights from 100% of your interactions to understand and validate the results from your random sample TSM surveys. This provides a richer, more reliable evidence base for your annual report to the Regulator.

The Benefit:

For the leadership team, it provides a clear, data-driven roadmap to improving TSMs. For resident engagement teams, it offers deep, authentic insight into the resident experience. For operational managers, it pinpoints the specific process and people-related issues that need to be addressed to drive satisfaction up.

As of April 2024, the Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code is statutory, meaning all landlords are legally obliged to follow its requirements. The Code mandates a strict two-stage process with tight response deadlines and requires landlords to identify a complaint even when the resident doesn’t use the word “complaint”. Failing to comply can lead to complaint handling failure orders, costly escalations, and significant reputational damage.

The FourNet Solution:

Drastically reduce escalations to the Housing Ombudsman by getting complaint handling right the first time. Our platform helps you automate compliance with the statutory Complaint Handling Code, identifying formal complaints early, ensuring correct procedure is followed, and analysing root causes to prevent future issues. Turn your complaints process from a liability into a powerful driver for service improvement.

Speech analytics embeds the principles of the Complaint Handling Code into your daily operations, ensuring a compliant, fair, and effective process.

• Automatic Complaint Identification: The system is trained to recognise any “expression of dissatisfaction” that qualifies as a complaint under the Code’s definition. Real-time analytics can prompt an agent to initiate the formal complaints process the moment such language is detected, ensuring no complaint is missed.
• Compliance Monitoring: By analysing 100% of interactions logged as complaints, the platform can automatically audit for compliance. It checks that responses are sent within the statutory timescales (10 working days for stage 1, 20 for stage 2) and that all parts of the complaint have been addressed, reducing the risk of procedural failure.
• Root Cause Analysis for Service Improvement: The Code requires landlords to use learning from complaints to drive service improvements. Speech analytics is the perfect tool for this, aggregating data from all complaints to identify the systemic issues--whether in repairs, communication, or policy--that are driving dissatisfaction, allowing you to fix them at the source.
• Empower Your Team: The platform provides your dedicated complaints team with the data and insights they need to handle complaints effectively, act independently, and resolve issues at the earliest possible stage.

The Benefit:

For the complaints team, it means fewer escalations and a more efficient, consistent process. For the Board, it reduces the risk of Ombudsman intervention and demonstrates a positive complaint handling culture. For the entire organization, it transforms complaints from a reactive burden into an invaluable source of intelligence for continuous improvement.

The Building Safety Act 2022 imposes significant new duties on housing associations as “Accountable Persons” for higher-risk buildings (over 18m or 7 storeys). Two core pillars of the Act are the creation of a “golden thread” of building information and the implementation of a robust Resident Engagement Strategy. You must be able to demonstrate to the new Building Safety Regulator that you are proactively communicating with residents about safety and that their voices are being heard. This requires a systematic and auditable approach to every safety-related conversation.

The FourNet Solution:

The Building Safety Act 2022 demands a new level of transparency and resident engagement. Our platform helps you uphold your “golden thread” of information in every interaction, ensuring safety information is communicated clearly and consistently. Create a fully auditable trail of your Resident Engagement Strategy in action, building resident trust and ensuring compliance with the Building Safety Regulator.

Speech analytics provides the tools to manage, monitor, and evidence your resident engagement on building safety.

• Ensure Accurate Communication: Real-Time Agent Assist can be configured to provide housing officers with approved, accurate information on-screen the moment a resident asks about a safety issue, such as fire safety measures or remediation works. This ensures communication is consistent and correct every time.
• Audit Your Engagement Strategy: Post-call analytics can automatically identify and categorise all conversations related to building safety. This creates an invaluable audit trail for the Regulator, proving that you are actively engaging with residents, listening to their concerns, and providing them with the required information.
• Identify Resident Concerns: By analysing sentiment and topics within safety-related calls, you can quickly identify areas where residents are confused, worried, or misinformed. This intelligence can be fed directly back into your Resident Engagement Strategy, allowing you to refine your communications and build greater trust.
• Manage Safety Complaints: The Act requires a specific process for building safety-related complaints. Our platform can identify these complaints and track them through to resolution, ensuring they are handled in line with your statutory duties.

The Benefit:

For the designated Accountable Person, it delivers peace of mind with a clear, auditable record of compliance. For residents, it provides clear, consistent communication that builds trust and confidence in their landlord. For frontline staff, it gives them the tools and confidence to handle sensitive and complex safety conversations correctly.

Maintaining the Decent Homes Standard is a fundamental responsibility, ensuring every property is in a reasonable state of repair, has modern facilities, and provides thermal comfort. The traditional model of relying on stock condition surveys and resident-reported repairs is reactive. It often means you only learn about a failing component--like a boiler, roof, or window--when it has already broken, potentially causing significant disruption for the resident and leading to more expensive emergency repairs.

The FourNet Solution:

Move beyond the cycle of reactive repairs. By listening to the Voice of the Resident across thousands of calls, you can identify early warnings of component failure and systemic issues across your housing stock. Use this intelligence to target planned investment where it’s most needed, preventing properties from falling below the Decent Homes Standard and making smarter, data-driven asset management decisions.

Speech analytics transforms your repairs contact centre into a source of powerful asset intelligence, enabling a shift from reactive to predictive maintenance.

• Identify Systemic Failures: The platform analyses 100% of repair calls and uses AI to spot trends that would be invisible to the naked eye. A rising number of calls about “faulty boilers” of a certain model, “leaking windows” in a specific block, or “kitchen component” failures across an estate can flag a systemic issue long before it’s due for replacement in a planned program.
• Create a Data-Driven Investment Case: This resident-led data provides a powerful evidence base to inform your capital investment programs. Instead of relying solely on age-based component lifecycles, you can target investment based on real-world failure rates, ensuring money is spent proactively where it will have the most impact on resident quality of life and prevent properties from becoming non-decent.
• Inform Stock Condition Surveys: Use the intelligence gathered from resident calls to better inform your physical stock condition surveys. You can direct surveyors to investigate specific issues that residents are frequently reporting, leading to more accurate and valuable survey data.
• Monitor Contractor Performance: Analyse conversations about repairs to gauge resident satisfaction with specific contractors, identifying issues with quality of work, communication, or professionalism.

The Benefit:

For the Asset Management team, it provides a new, dynamic stream of intelligence to build a truly predictive maintenance strategy. For the Finance team, it enables better-justified investment decisions and improved value for money. For residents, it means better quality homes with fewer failures and disruptions.

Housing association contact centres are under constant pressure to improve resident service while managing tight internal budgets and performance targets. High volumes of repeat calls, long call handling times (AHT), and time-consuming manual quality assurance (QA) processes are major drivers of inefficiency and cost. Simply asking staff to work harder is not a sustainable solution.

The FourNet Solution:

Radically improve your operational efficiency and reduce costs without compromising service. Our platform identifies the true root causes of repeat calls, allowing you to fix broken processes and reduce avoidable demand. Automate up to 100% of your quality assurance, freeing up managers to focus on high-value coaching. Empower your team with real-time assistance to resolve issues faster on the first call. Deliver a better, more efficient service at a lower cost.

Speech analytics provides a multi-pronged approach to unlock significant operational efficiencies.

• Automate and Standardise Call Notes: Detailed and uniformly structured notes can be generated by analysing and summarising transcribed conversations.  This reduces handling times of calls and allows agents to focus on empathetic and connected conversations rather than taking notes in conversation to summarise later.  Improving efficiency and effectiveness of interactions is a win for agents, customers and the organisational cost base.
• Eliminate Repeat Calls at the Source: The single biggest driver of inefficiency is often avoidable demand. Speech analytics performs root cause analysis on 100% of interactions to pinpoint exactly why residents are having to call back. Whether it’s a confusing letter about service charges, a broken self-service process on your website, or a failure to set correct expectations on a repair, you can identify and fix the underlying issue, permanently reducing call volume.
• Automate Quality Assurance: Manually reviewing 2-5 calls per agent per month is time-consuming, inconsistent, and statistically insignificant. Our platform automates the process, scoring 100% of interactions against your specific quality criteria. This saves hundreds of hours of supervisor time, provides fairer and more consistent feedback to staff, and frees managers to focus on high-impact coaching rather than administration.
• Improve First Contact Resolution (FCR): Empower your housing officers with Real-Time Agent Assist. As the system listens to the call, it can automatically provide on-screen guidance, prompt for the right questions, or surface the correct knowledge base article to help resolve the query on the first attempt. This reduces AHT, improves FCR, and boosts staff confidence.

The Benefit:

For the Head of Housing, it delivers a significant and measurable reduction in operational costs. For Team Leaders, it provides more time to coach and develop their people. For frontline staff, it gives them the tools to be more effective and successful in their roles, improving both the resident and employee experience.

Want to see how Interaction Analytics can help your organisation? Complete the form below and we will be in touch to book a one-to-one demonstration.