Curo Develops Co-Creative Community Panel

Curo’s challenge was to establish a community of customer-participants who would become the link between Curo and their key audience. These participants would need to inform the development of a wide variety of material from new policies, to promotional, informational, and marketing collateral in order to transform the firm into a truly customer-centric organisation.

One significant driver of research initiatives for Curo was the UK Government Social Housing Green Paper, which aims to rebalance the relationships between landlords and residents, and provide more stability and support for both parties. Curo decided to take this opportunity to ramp up its market research schedule to see which services and processes its customers - tennants - thought could be improved or redesigned to better fit their needs.

Curo built an online community panel on the FlexMR InsightHub, which was
branded VoiceBox. Providing a mix of both quantitative and qualitative activities, Curo ensured a large number of active participants were ready to provide insights on topics that could inform decisions accross the business.

‘‘Everyone at FlexMR has been so friendly and supportive. It seems to be a part of the culture and makes them enjoyable to work with.” - Nick Paul, Head of Performance & Insights

Curo’s Performance and Insight team regularly uses the SurveyMR tool to track and measure customer satisfaction of a variety of topics. The insight gathered through these surveys informs future activitiies and helps the team prioritise topics that require further exploration.

SmartboardMR provides even more indepth qualitative and actionable insight on a variety of visual materials. In these tasks, the community points and reward system incentivise participation and ensure detailed feedback. One notable document that has been
through this process is Curo’s new customer commitment policy, which received significant revisions to the content, tone and style so it would meet and exceed customer expectations.

“This community panel has been a fantastic tool for taking resident involvement to the next level; with the rich feedback we’ve received, we’ve managed to improve many policies and procedures to make life easier for our customers.” - Nick Paul, Head of Performance & Insights

In addition to ongoing research, Curo created a dedicated project around the UK Government Social Housing Green Paper. Curo engaged customers in order to understand which services, processes, and policies should be developed or changed to best meet the recommendations of the paper. Curo then fed these insights and resulting actions into a report on progress towards the government’s recommendations.

“The insights generated from the VoiceBox community panel have influenced Curo’s organisational and brand development.” - Nick Paul, Head of Performance & Insights

Through Voicebox, Curo is able to keep its fingers on the pulse of customer satisfaction and use insight generated by the platform to improve policies, processes and services. This insight is central to Curo’s customer centricity transformation and informing decisions across the business.

Curo is planning to grow its insights team, working with Voicebox, and the volume of activity within the platform. The company believes greater engagement, more tasks and encouraging customer-led feedback are all aspects that will contribute to the growing role of insights.