OVERVIEW
Listening is an art. For Tai Calon, Blaenau Gwent’s largest provider of social housing, the ability to master this most humane of skills is — as we’ll see — helping the organisation to not just create policies, but to implement those that are shaped and sculpted by the very residents it serves.
Small in size yet big in heart, this is a region of Wales where communities have long come together to pull through adversity. Yet for Tai Calon, capturing resident feedback — in all its subtle shades and tones — hasn’t always been simple or straightforward. But by collaborating with Granicus and leaning into the power of the Engagement Cloud solution, this housing association is now able to obtain clear insight into what matters most to those it serves. Yet more than this, it is able to respond to residents not just through policy, but with a deep sense of empathy and a true understanding of their needs.
SITUATION
Prior to commencing its partnership with Granicus, Customer Wellbeing & Engagement Manager Phillip Meek explains that the housing association used psychographic segmentation to refine its understanding of its residents. As a result of this, says Phillip, “We knew the issues that we were facing, and we knew that our current methods of engagement were only scratching the surface of the demographic of our customer base.”
This, he emphasises, reinforced the real-world knowledge and experience of Tai Calon’s front-line staff: that the various means and methods of engagement it had trialled prior to working with Granicus — from online platforms and surveys to in-person focus groups — simply were not suited to capturing the sentiment of many of the housing association’s residents and tenants. But Phillip adds that, due to the painstaking psychographic segmentation conducted by Tai Calon, it was also clear that the association’s residents had a significant digital presence.
But for Customer Engagement Coordinator Steve Wetten, the results of this segmentation proved that Tai Calon’s online presence was lacking. He added that there was no way for Tai Calon to engage with the vast majority of its residents, or vice versa, unless a customer picked up the phone or attended an event in-person. Phillip explains that it then made sense for them “to get an online engagement platform that some of our harder to reach customers could access to give us their views anytime, anyplace.” This, he said, “would give us the opportunity to get a true reflection of the views of our customers — across all demographics — which would enable us to look at our services and what we’re doing for them.”
SOLUTION
By choosing to partner with Granicus — and specifically, by using Engagement Cloud — Steve states that Tai Calon has developed a means of acting on the results gleaned via the in-depth psychographic segmentation of its residents. For him, this is a platform that allows the organisation to “capture customer feedback from a diverse range of customers.”
Yet for Phillip, the decision to work with Granicus and adopt Engagement Cloud — one made collectively by the team at Tai Calon — represented something far more profound. “I’m a firm believer in partnerships and relationships and we like to work with people where you start out as a partnership, but our partnership then develops into a friendship. We think that is just a far more productive way to work,” he says, adding, “I can feel us becoming friends, not just partners.”
For Steve, a positive onboarding process has done much to nurture the relationship between Granicus and Tai Calon. Praising the knowledgeable and prompt assistance received since the initial implementation of the platform, he describes his experience as “extremely positive,” adding, “I can’t fault it.” This is a view also shared by Phillip, who adds that the perceptive level of insight shown by the Granicus support team has been “amazing.”
This sense of collective partnership is echoed in the origins of the very name of the portal that — powered by Engagement Cloud — has allowed the organisation to capture customer insight and feedback in full clarity. Feeling strongly that the platform should truly reflect the people it represents, Tai Calon held a competition among the pupils of a local Welsh-language school to give a name its new portal.
With this, Llais ein Pobl — which translates to, “voice of our people” — was born. As we’ll see, this new portal has indeed been true to its name, offering Tai Calon’s tenants a way of making themselves truly heard and, likewise, of empowering the housing association to implement the kinds of change that will have the most meaningful impact on the lives of those it serves.
RESULTS
Within the first few months, Phillip says that the Engagement Cloud platform — via the Llais ein Pobl portal — has already resulted in tangible outcomes for Tai Calon and its residents. “I think already as a result of our varied feedback, we have made changes and redrafted one of our really important policies around vulnerable customers,” he says. He stresses that — because of resident insight gathered via the portal — Tai Calon has now “almost flipped on its head” its process of dealing with this demographic of tenant.
Phillip is unwavering in the view that,
He adds that the housing association now has a “true representation” of residents’ views and experiences. But more than this, he states that, thanks to the functionality behind Llais ein Pobl, Tai Calon is now able to complete its all-important circle of engagement.
Adding further context, Phillip says that while Tai Calon has always asked for resident feedback, the organisation has often struggled to present its findings back to tenants and — more importantly — to clearly address their concerns. But thanks to Llais ein Pobl, Tai Calon is now able to offer a more direct response to tenant feedback. For example, as Steve explains, Llais ein Pobl has recently been used as a platform to showcase video content in which senior members of the Tai Calon team directly respond to tenant concerns. These videos, says Phillip, have been well-received and — with click and open rates increasing — have boosted the association’s standing on social media while endowing it with a sense transparency and accountability.
The organisation has also seen positive early results in terms of its efforts to attract registered users to its new portal. As Steve explained, a light-hearted competition helped to bolster engagement with the platform shortly after its launch. “If people registered by the end of August … and if they completed the sign-up questions that we had for our segmentation data, they went into a prize draw,” he says, adding that word-of-mouth soon spread knowledge of the competition, increasing excitement and ultimately boosting resident engagement with the newly launched platform.
In those early days, “We had lots of consultations that we wanted to get out to our customers … so we had something to start the platform with,” Phillip adds. But now, he says, the team is seeking to use it throughout their operations and even — as the following example highlights — in a more light-hearted manner.
“Somebody made a comment about our hold music when they phone in,” explains Phillip, who saw this as an opportunity to engage with Tai Calon’s residents using their new portal. On the back of this, Steve created a survey in Llais ein Pobl asking residents for their feedback on the kind of music they wanted to hear when phoning the housing association. This action was positively received by residents who, says Steve, were impressed with Tai Calon’s fast turnaround on the topic.
Phillip adds that the team like the platform for its “flexibility and how quickly we can just turn it on when we need to. It’s incredibly responsive.”
Phillip adds that, for Tai Calon, Engagement Cloud represents, “Customer engagement … almost in its purest form.” The platform’s ability to deliver clear and concise insight into resident feedback is particularly helpful when communicating their concerns to the upper echelons of the organisation. As he explains, “We can now genuinely say, ‘This is what people are telling us. This is the real story.’”
“If we’re serious about being a social landlord, if we’re serious about improving our communities, if we’re serious about meeting our corporate plan objectives, then this is what we’ve got to do … let’s now spend our time and energy doing the things that make a difference to our customers instead of doing the things that we think might make a difference to our customers,” says Phillip, adding that the data generated by Engagement Cloud is paramount in driving change for both Tai Calon and, most importantly, for its residents.
As exciting as these initial results are, Phillip and Steve are hopeful of both the potential uses of the platform and, likewise, of the results yet to come. “I know, in 12 months’ time, we will be doing something with the system that we didn’t even know it could do,” says Phillip. While Steve is still in the process of exploring the platform, The Communications capability (govDelivery) is a standout feature of the system while the pin functionality on the places tool allows residents to highlight the areas served by Tai Calon that are in need of improvement.
However, Steve is also eager to roll the platform out to Tai Calon’s housing team with a view to creating localised estate-based engagement. Contrasting it with their former methods of engagement, Steve says, “Previously, the only thing we could do would be to go and knock on a few doors with a survey, put on a community event and hopefully get people out.” Now, he says, staff can simply invite them to use the Llais ein Pobl portal.
In terms of their ambition to increase future engagement, Steve says that — as of February 2026 — there were 522 participants registered to the platform, but the organisation is seeking to boost this to 750 by 1st September 2026. Outside of this, there’s also an internal drive to involve other departments in order to help direct resident engagement and boost self-sufficiency among tenants. For Phillip, the idea is to roll the platform out to Tai Calon’s customer-facing teams as well as to its tenant liaison and customer liaison officers, to be able to offer them more independence in terms of how they use the portal as an engagement tool. But the goal, is he says, is to ensure that “customer engagement genuinely becomes embedded throughout the organisation.”
Though the association’s road to engagement has only just begun, Phillip is succinct in his view of the platform and what it has to offer both Tai Calon and the residents it serves, saying that he “couldn’t imagine not having the platform now.”
But perhaps more than anything else, these words are a testament to the fact that — for Tai Calon — listening has become not simply an art, but an ethos. By truly hearing the voices of those it serves in all of their differing shades and tones, the organisation is now able to create policies to help its residents, meeting calls for support with the assurance of firm assistance.
