Boothman, C and Craig, N (2016) Five star status in the UK house building sector: A realistic indication of customer satisfaction or pure fantasy. In: Chan, P W and Neilson, C J (eds.) Proceedings of 32nd Annual ARCOM Conference, 5-7 September 2016, Manchester, UK.
Abstract
The Barker Review of Housing published in March 2004 commanded that “the house building industry must demonstrate increased levels of customer satisfaction” and called for the Home Builders Federation (HBF) to develop a strategy to improve the level of customer satisfaction. In partnership with the National House Building Council (NHBC) the HBF introduced a national survey of house builders, which launched in 2005 as a self-completion survey to the purchasers of new build homes at both 8 weeks and 9 months after legal completion. The results for two questions “quality of the home” and “recommendation to a friend” culminate in the award of a star rating between 1 and 5. Albeit HBF surveys completed over a nine-year period show steady improvement in relation to customer satisfaction. Further research was conducted to examine how the data collected by the NHBC is used in practice to improve the service provided to the customers, the transition of any changes into practice and the overall management of the customer satisfaction process by the builder. In order to explore how this data is utilized in practice, six semi structured in depth interviews have been carried out with developers and analysis of the exploratory data revealed a gap between the published statistics and current practice and further suggest the surveys were unlikely to reflect the true experiences and opinions of the customer. The research concluded that the customer can be manipulated by the builders in some cases causing a bias in the market; on the whole the customer satisfaction surveys and star rating are simply seen as a marketing tool, used by the builders marketing department as a sign of quality and a way to promote the company. Until the industry makes a paradigm shift to embrace customer satisfaction and customer care it is unlikely to advance.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | customer satisfaction; quality; defects; housing. |
| Index terms: | housing, statistics, marketing, customer satisfaction, building industry, paradigm, bias, survey, purchaser, new build, builder, partnership, strategy, national survey, interview |
| Subjects: | sociology, partnership management, industry analysis, construction integration, management, education and knowledge transfer, probability and distributions, service delivery, research products and data, mathematical modelling, business, construction type, data collection methods, practitioner |
| Topics: | Construction Technology, Roles and Professions, Stakeholder Management, Research Practice, Business Strategy |
| Descriptive scope: | 5 PCTEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here