How Citizen Housing built a genuinely joined-up customer service, and won Best Customer Experience at the People in Housing Awards.

Most housing providers don't have a shortage of technology.

They have a shortage of technology that talks to each other.

That was the starting point for Citizen Housing’s award-winning transformation programme, which is the focus of the latest episode of the People in Housing Podcast. We were joined by Scott Worth, Director of Customer Experience, and Reanne Smith, Digital Change & Diagnostic Team Manager at Citizen, to explore the journey behind the transformation. Their project, a shift to a genuinely joined-up, omnichannel customer service platform built on Amazon Connect, won Best Customer Experience at the People in Housing Awards. It was also the first awards submission the team had ever put forward.

Citizen Housing had plenty of digital tools, a chatbot, a phone system, a website, a customer portal, but none of them worked together, and the portal was, in their own words, unusable. Rather than adding more technology, the team consolidated around all their disconnected systems into one platform, brought residents into the design process from day one, and rebuilt the service around genuine self-serve. The result: an 83% self-serve containment rate on chat, roughly £40,000 in savings so far being reinvested into further automation, and most importantly a disabled long-term resident telling the team they'd opened up services she didn't even know existed.

The problem wasn't a lack of technology. It was fragmentation

Citizen Housing manages around 30,000 homes across the Midlands, spanning a genuinely diverse set of housing types, from high-rise blocks (a stock the organisation is gradually decommissioning) to low-rise and general needs housing. Layered on top of that is a comparatively young tenant profile, with the same expectations of convenience and flexibility that any consumer now has: the ability to do things outside the traditional 9-to-5, in a way that suits them.

The organisation already had a significant contact centre handling high volumes of repairs and general enquiries. It also had a chatbot, phone-based services, a website and a customer portal. On paper, that looks like strong digital provision. In reality, none of those channels were connected, none were particularly usable, and the customer portal itself was widely seen by residents as not fit for purpose.

The result was a classic multichannel, rather than omnichannel, set-up: lots of individual tools, none of them working as a single, coherent service.

What does an omnichannel approach actually solve?

For Citizen, the fix wasn't buying more and more technology. It was consolidation. The team built a single, centralised platform on Amazon Connect that brought voice, email and chat into one place, replacing a sprawling and costly legacy stack of around 68 separate systems.

That consolidation did two things at once. Operationally, it meant one connected view of the customer rather than fragments spread across disconnected tools. Financially, it cut the ongoing cost of maintaining that legacy estate, Citizen estimates savings of around £40,000 so far, money the team is now reinvesting into the next layer of automation and AI capability. It's become, in their words, a self-funding programme: each stage of improvement helps pay for the next., which is exactly what you want from a project like this.

Crucially, the platform was also designed to be reconfigurable by the operational team itself, rather than requiring IT involvement for every change. That required real investment in building internal capability, learning through trial and error, testing ideas, failing, adjusting and trying again, supported by peer networks of other housing providers on the same journey. The upside has been a team that is now materially more resilient, more independent and more confident solving problems without waiting on specialist support.

Bringing residents into the build, not just the launch

One of the clearest differentiators in Citizen's approach was when residents were involved, not at the end, as testers of a finished product, but early, as co-designers.

The team built an early draft of their new chatbot and took it directly to residents for feedback before launch, rather than after. That feedback shaped real changes to the design. When the chatbot did go live, the team went back to the same residents to show them what had changed and why, closing the loop rather than treating engagement as a one-off consultation exercise.

That same principle extended to smaller, more human details: asking residents what they thought of hold music, and how they felt about being offered a call-back rather than staying on hold. It's a minor point, but it reflects a wider theme in the project, treating customer experience as something built with residents, not delivered to them.

The results speak to that approach. The new chatbot now achieves an 83% self-serve containment rate, the proportion of conversations resolved entirely within the chatbot, without needing to be passed to a human agent, and without any AI-driven automation yet layered on top. That's a meaningful marker of a tool residents actually trust to use, not one they route around.

Change management mattered as much as the technology.

A less visible but equally important part of the project was staff engagement. Many contact centre colleagues had used the same systems for years, and an entire platform change understandably created anxiety about competence and confidence in a new role overnight.

Rather than a top-down rollout, the team ran hands-on sessions allowing colleagues to explore the new platform, test it and build familiarity ahead of go-live. The investment paid off: the eventual cutover from old system to new happened cleanly, with no significant issues on launch day.

What the award recognised beyond the technology.

The most striking evidence of impact came from a resident story shared during the podcast: a deaf, long-standing Citizen customer who told the team that the new service had opened up options she hadn't known existed, after years of finding it difficult, sometimes impossible, to access support in ways that worked for her.

That story captures what the judges at the People in Housing Awards were ultimately recognising. This wasn't a project about adopting a well-known platform for its own sake. It was about using that platform as, in the team's words, a foundation — a "can opener" — for a genuinely more accessible, inclusive service. The organisation has also been explicit that digital-first will never mean digital-exclusive. There will always be a human on the other end of the phone for those who need it.

Looking ahead, Citizen is already building on this foundation, exploring voice biometrics, a self-learning chatbot, and eventually a 24/7, multilingual AI-assisted service, alongside a "listening" phase designed to understand what customers are actually calling about, so the organisation can reduce reliance on human contact where it isn't needed, without ever removing the option.

For an organisation entering the People in Housing Awards for the first time, winning Best Customer Experience is a strong signal, not just of a technically well-executed platform migration, but of what happens when resident voice, staff confidence and genuine system integration are treated as equally important parts of the same transformation.

FAQs:

What is omnichannel customer service, and how is it different from multichannel?

Multichannel means offering several separate contact routes that operate independently of one another. Omnichannel means those routes are connected on a single platform, so a resident's history and context carry across channels rather than resetting each time. Many housing providers assume they're already omnichannel because they offer multiple channels, when those channels don't talk to each other.

How can housing associations reduce pressure on their contact centre?

The most effective approach combines genuine self-serve tools (a chatbot or portal residents trust to use) with consolidating disconnected systems onto one platform and using data to understand what residents are contacting the provider about in the first place, so recurring, resolvable queries can be deflected from a human agent. Technology alone doesn't achieve this; it depends on residents finding the self-serve option genuinely easier than calling.

What is a good self-serve or containment rate for a housing provider's chatbot?

There's no single sector benchmark, but a well-designed, resident-tested chatbot can realistically achieve containment rates in the 70–85% range for straightforward queries, even without additional AI on top. Rates well below that usually indicate a tool residents don't trust or find genuinely useful, often because it wasn't tested with residents before launch.

How should housing providers involve residents in designing digital services?

The most effective approach is involving residents before launch, not just afterwards. Sharing an early draft, gathering honest feedback, making visible changes based on that feedback, and then showing residents the result closes the loop and builds trust in future changes, rather than treating consultation as a box-ticking exercise once a decision is already made.

Can digital transformation projects pay for themselves?

Yes. Consolidating fragmented legacy systems onto a single platform often reduces licensing and maintenance costs significantly, and those savings can be reinvested into the next phase of automation, creating a self-funding cycle rather than requiring a large upfront budget for every new stage.

If you'd like to hear the full conversation with Scott & Reanne from Citizen Housing, you can find the People in Housing Podcast on Spotify and YouTube. To find out more about Citizen Housing, visit citizenhousing.org.uk.

Useful links:

• Listen to the People in Housing Podcast on Spotify
• Watch the People in Housing Podcast on YouTube
• Learn more about Citizen Housing