We have entered a major revolution of our society where digital will fundamentally change the way tenants, landlords and communities engage, argues David Wilton.
Tenant engagement is an ever-moving practice. A decade ago, the focus was on formal tenant and resident associations with recognition from their landlord, own bank accounts and constitutions. We love a structured committee in Wales and tenants and landlords rose to the challenge in the post-millennium world.
Today’s tenant participation is a wonderful mix of techniques, using structured and less formal techniques which blend the best of real human interaction, pairing tenants’ interests with challenges, backed with data, wider communities and online interaction. However, I believe Welsh society has already entered into a major digital revolution that will transform how we live, work and play and tenant engagement must adapt to this.
Focus groups of the future
Let’s start with the humble tenant focus group. Emotion detection and recognition technology will soon change how we operate. This is not just about using Artificial Intelligence (AI) analysis of facial signals to determine people’s emotions better than humans (it can already do that!). AI will use that emotional insight to create rapid further personalisation options to really understand tenant behaviour and create a better ongoing experience.
Not convinced?
Disney has been for some time using emotion detection techniques to analyse how audiences react to its films. Technology can read complex facial expressions and predict upcoming emotions.
It quickly learns what you like and don’t. By using over 16 million data points and it can look forward and successfully predict if you will smile or laugh at upcoming scenes in the film. They have been doing this for a few years now and many of the big budget films you have seen have been tweaked and adapted based on these pre-release tests.
As this technology develops, we will get powerful tenant insight compared to current techniques that can contain response bias. We have all observed or been part of focus groups or tenant meetings where individuals dominated, or facilitators or attendees have steered the ‘group think’ of these events. Surveys can also lead the respondent, or we know that sometimes tenants don’t want to be overly critical as we sometimes see a ‘just be grateful’ culture that has frustratingly developed amongst some tenants.
We will use this emotion technology to customise and adapt ideas and proposals to achieve a new approach to co-production; where tenants have consciously and unconsciously developed outcomes and solutions that lead to better tenant and landlord services and satisfaction.
Changing homes means changing engagement
My view is that home assistants like Amazon’s Echo (with Alexa) are the biggest gamechanger in our lives since the first iPhone in 2007. As speech-recognition accuracy goes from 95 per cent to 99 per cent, we’ll go from barely using them to them being at the heart of our home and our interactions with each other. According to Kantar Worldpanel research, three million households in the UK currently own an Amazon Echo or Google Home device and this figure is rising fast.
Forecasts show that within 3 years that 30 per cent of your web browsing will be without a screen. Many homes will soon have devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo – if they haven’t already. Much like the first smartphones, you will first use the limited default functionality but in a few short years it will become as important in the home and office as smartphones have become. Screenless digital time will overtake digital screen time.
I believe this will be a game changer. People will adapt quickly once the speech recognition is configured. In time, AI will provide that deep learning and understanding enabling interactions with people who have been digitally excluded and have struggled to grasp the functions of computers and phones.
Google recently made a real effort to show that voice interactions with technology are becoming a key part of our lives. It has already published specific instructions relating to screenless technology (such as voice assistants). Websites may need to be reconfigured. People will expect developing AI like Alexa to find information whilst you multi-task.
The retail sector is already moving swift to adapt to this and some care and support providers are piloting new services. Housing tech looks likely to follow suit but with caution.
Learning and skill development
We have seen major advances in online learning and especially video games over recent years. One of the criticisms is that too much content is not personalised or cannot adapt to the learner or player.
Emotion detection will be built into learning and gaming going forward which will allow greater adaption of the narrative in real-time. The first phase of these type of games has been released; it utilises the user’s webcam to monitor the player’s facial expression, so it can alter game experience to either challenge the user by increasing the difficulty or lowering it for those who struggle to adapt to the game’s default complexity or pace. It will even stop the game in the event of serious distress or confusion.
The best example at the moment is Nevermindwhich ‘uses biofeedback technology to detect your feelings of stress while playing. When you start to become scared or anxious, the game will dynamically respond to those feelings, which in turn directly affects gameplay’.
This type of technical leap is a good thing that will allow a more inclusive approach to learning where people’s ability, learning style and even literacy will be considered by the software and adapts quickly. It will detect and adapt to individual’s learning difficulties and challenges. It can build in incentives for players to consider and control their own emotions (for example,. make it easier when they are calm) to progress in the game. This could deliver many real-life outcomes.
Contact with landlord
Two thousand years of house building in Wales has not eradicated drafts, leaks, strange smells and the age old anti-social behaviour (I don’t mean English invasions!) so I can confidently predict that it’s unlikely that the digital revolution of the next decade will solve that. What will change how tenants report complaints and repairs.
If you have attended any TPAS Cymru events recently you may have watched a Google video about Google Duplex, their new voice recognition and speak technology. The ability that they have developed is staggering and it will not be long before Duplex-type technology becomes the heart of customer contact centres dealing with reporting and booking repairs, rent enquiries and payments ‘livechat’ etc. It doesn’t sleep and can handle scale and peak times of day. This could deliver real cost reduction in housing services which should hopefully be reflected in tenants’ rents.
Community engagement
We still love out notice boards, posters and damp planning applications flapping in the wind from lampposts.
In 2015, M&C Saatchi pioneered the first AI-powered physical advertisements. In London, they used two bus shelters and a fake coffee shop window to display virtual posters that change based on consumer reaction, with text, image and content options changing based on peoples’ expressions. The next phase plan is to integrate with data from the users’ mobile phone so that as they approach the ads are customised for them from the start in a style that interests them.
For housing and local communities this could be really powerful. Walking past a potential development site, users can learn more about the plan depending on their reaction. If positive, would they support the application? Do they want to register an interest in the properties when work starts etc? If negative, the AI can attempt to overcome their objections as it learns what counter arguments are working or not based on their unconscious reactions.
Developing new engagement using Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) is not something you experience at 3am in Cardiff’s Caroline Street but is where the real world is added to by computer generated information, usually by a headset or goggles/eyewear. The BBC is quoting analysis that the sector will be worth £100 billion in 6 years. For many, myself included, there was disappointment with the much-anticipated Magic Leap One headset that launched this summer after years of development and an alleged $2.3bn of development funding! There is still some work to done making AR a tenant engagement tool.
I dream of a time when AR allows citizens to input into designing their own communities and public infrastructure. For example, standing in front of an undeveloped site with an AR headset they can swipe in different types of properties, add a cycle path, move the park to the best position whilst the system keeps you inside budget. Or go into their future home, and re-imagine their home with different furnishings, layout or adaptions.
Going forward
Housing is constantly changing and if it is to keep pace with society it will need to consider new challenges of managing privacy and investing in the right technology. As a sector, we don’t have the resources of Disney or Amazon but as it becomes more cost effective, reliable and usable we must plan as society adapts.
The housing sector has the potential to use technology to realise cost savings in customer services and have a much deeper relationship with tenants. Time will tell which organisations will lead this and who will be left behind. TPAS Cymru will continue to follow and advise on these developments across the Welsh Housing Sector.
David Rhys Wilton is director of TPAS Cymru