How Mid Devon Housing Transformed Repairs Insight with Voicescape Feedback

Mid Devon Housing (MDH), the housing department of Mid Devon District Council, manages around 3,000 low-cost rental homes spread across a predominantly rural region, covering three main towns and many outlying hamlets and villages. Their responsive repairs service is largely managed in-house, with dedicated plumbers, carpenters, and masons supporting tenants directly. This high-volume service is often the frontline of customer interaction, making it a critical area for tenant satisfaction and service improvement.

The Challenge

Before engaging with Voicescape, MDH had no structured or scalable process in place to gather tenant feedback following responsive repairs.

"Our efforts in this area had been quite limited” explained Sophie Richards, Customer Manager. "Some surveys were carried out several years ago, but staffing constraints meant we couldn’t maintain them. Given how important repairs are to our tenants, we knew we needed to change that"

Paper-based surveys had once been issued directly by operatives, but as Simon Harder, Team Lead for Customer and Responsive Repairs, noted, this created skewed results:

"The old method was to hand the form to tenants at the end of a job. But obviously, people were reluctant to give negative feedback face-to-face. It wasn’t working."

The lack of insight created a blind spot in service delivery, especially around communication.

"The workmen are excellent," said Sophie, "but we were falling down in how we kept tenants informed. We didn’t have visibility into which parts of the experience were letting us down."

The Solution

Mid Devon Housing adopted Voicescape Feedback in November 2024 to automate post-repair tenant engagement and provide data they could act on. Voicescape enables tenants to share their feedback via phone shortly after a repair is completed. MDH tailored the service by recording messages in their own operatives’ voices, helping to build familiarity and encourage honest responses. "The regional voice piece was a big driver," Sophie said. "It’s personalised, and tenants recognise the people. It adds trust."

Mid Devon send calls daily to ensure timely outreach:

"We want feedback when the experience is fresh. That immediacy helps us capture real sentiment and follow up quickly if needed."

The Results

Since implementation, MDH has received 348 survey responses from tenants, with a 25% response rate and an overall satisfaction score of 79.6%. "For us, that’s a strong result," said Sophie. "Getting that kind of response from tenants—especially in a rural area isn’t easy."

More importantly, the feedback is driving improvement:

"We look at dissatisfied responses, follow up with calls, and use it to shape lessons learned. We also include trends in our annual report and share outcomes publicly."

The team is exploring further use cases, including applying Voicescape Feedback to planned maintenance and complaints. "It would be a missed opportunity not to expand it," Sophie added. "It saves officer time and provides us with higher-quality data."

Internal Engagement and Staff Motivation

Beyond service improvement, the feedback gained has had a morale-boosting effect on the repairs team:

"We share all the positive comments verbatim with our operatives," said Sophie. "It really lifts them. They feel recognised. It’s not just about catching what went wrong, it’s about celebrating what went right."

Onboarding and Support

Both Sophie and Simon praised the support from Voicescape: "Chelsie has been amazing. Nothing is too much trouble, she responds quickly, puts training in the diary, and just makes things happen," Sophie said.

Simon added: "I once uploaded something wrong and within minutes Chelsie emailed me. Not to tell me off, but to offer help. That kind of support matters."

Next Steps

The MDH team plans to integrate more of their tenant engagement into Voicescape. Plans are underway to expand into other modules and standardise survey processes across more services. "We're moving toward using Voicescape across planned maintenance and maybe even complaints. There’s so much more we can do with it," said Sophie. Despite initial concerns about older tenants not engaging with automated calls, the team has seen strong uptake and no negative feedback.

"We’re entering a digital age, but phones still work. It suits different demographics, and we’re not seeing resistance," Sophie explained. "It’s even helped with data cleansing when numbers don’t connect."

Mid Devon Housing is using Voicescape to bridge the feedback gap in repairs, delivering valuable insight, saving officer time, and lifting frontline morale. With further expansion in sight, they are embedding feedback more deeply into service improvement and tenant engagement. "We want to be open and honest. If something goes wrong, we want to know about it and fix it. Voicescape gives us that chance," said Sophie.

Voicescape Feedback is a powerful, automated survey tool designed to help housing providers engage tenants after key service interactions, capture sentiment in real time, and drive continuous improvement through meaningful insights. Get in touch with the Voicescape team to see how Feedback could help you turn service moments into opportunities for improvement, insight, and impact.