After carrying out a survey most clients will read through the survey report, examine the data tables and share the results. Following on from this the next natural stage is to convene a meeting to discuss the findings, however we often find many clients need a steer as what to do to fully utilise the results. This checklist may help you maximise the usefulness of all of the information:

• Targets – How do the results compare to any targets set. Are there any short comings. Have any targets been exceeded?
• Areas of low satisfaction – Look at the top line results and determine an acceptable cut off point for satisfaction (this might be 70%, 75%, 80% or even 85%). Which ratings fall below this level? Can you justify why they are lower?
• Areas of high dissatisfaction – Look at the levels of dissatisfaction for individual ratings and list out all of those where more than one in ten (10%) of residents are dissatisfied. What needs to be done to reduce these figures?
• Meaningful comparison with peers – Are you in a benchmarking group / club in which you can share and discuss all of the results from the survey, and not just the HouseMark questions?
• Organisational vision / aims – Do the results match your organisational vision?
• Resident comments (positive and negative) – Review all of the written comments with the relevant teams, these are priceless nuggets of information usually containing suggestions on where you need to improve service delivery as well as what you are doing well in keeping residents satisfied!
• Play with the data – Run cross tabs to examine differences by tenure, diversity, geography, stock etc.
• Is there anything unusual – If you find something that does not make sense, don’t ignore it – keep working at it until you can understand the pattern.
• Key driver analysis – Run regression to see what is driving key areas of satisfaction with overall services and the repairs service
• Higher or lower – If your results have increased (or decreased) was this at the same level across all services or have some services changed more than others? Investigate why.
• Confirming other work – The results from a STAR survey should correlate with any other research you have carried out between the surveys. If it doesn’t you need to explore why.
• Maximise the positive – Make sure you publicise the results to all of your customers (internal and external)
• Decide what you need to keep a close eye on – If the survey highlights certain areas that are underperforming or you are going to review, now is the time to plan an interim survey which will keep the information timely. Nobody wants to wait three years to find out whether something worked or not.
• Linking the data – Can the results be used with other data (such as internal housing management data) to provide greater customer insight?
• Customer insight – Look at those questions which measured the customer experience, these will give you greater understanding of your customers (not the ones that give you a percentage rating)?
• Customer segmentation – Would it be useful to group your customers into different groups to define different characteristics and behaviours to help you truly understand your customers?
• Customer recovery – If you collected permission to re-contact residents and they gave you information in any comments sections, review whether it is worth making contact to resolve any outstanding issues.