Who wants to be vulnerable?

Week beginning 23 June 2025 is ‘Vulnerability Week’. This initiative, in its second year and led by the UK-wide, cross-sector Collaboration Network challenges businesses to ‘create stronger, more empathetic connections with customers’.

The week aims to help organisations cultivate greater trust ‘through transparency, empathy and understanding, ensuring that vulnerable customers feel respected and supported at all touchpoints’. The agenda is based around five critical components that form the acronym T.R.U.S.T:

• Transparency – openness and honesty to strengthen relationships
• Respect – creating an environment where customers feel valued
• Understanding – utilising data to continuously improve services
• Support – offering customers appropriate help, to match their needs
• Tailoring – using inclusive design and feedback to enhance services.

It’s all good stuff, but the title and emphasis on people being ‘vulnerable’ somewhat jars with emerging best practice and a genuine commitment to equality, diversity and fairness. Who would ever choose the label ‘vulnerable’ to hang around their own neck? And if we wouldn’t choose it, is it right to refer to others this way?

Building trust through positive language

There are plenty of definitions of trust – academic, philosophical, artistic and otherwise. Practically though, trust is about believing that someone will be reliable and trustworthy, and that they’ll act in your best interests. It’s also about judging whether placing your trust in a person or organisation might harm you.

The Housing Ombudsman Service explores this vital element of customer service in its wide-ranging report Repairing Trust. This identifies trust as ‘the missing piece in the repairs and maintenance puzzle’.

The Ombudsman rightly says that ‘trust begins with organisational values and behaviours’, and that value-based policies and practices need to be communicated ‘using respectful language to foster a human-centric culture’. This, the report argues, creates ‘an environment where all residents, including those with additional needs or language barriers, feel empowered and are easily able to report repairs’.

Too often though, warns the Ombudsman (citing the thousands of customer complaints referred to it), the language used by housing providers is ‘dehumanising, dismissive, derogatory and stigmatising’. Alongside other industry jargon like ‘landlord’, ‘stock’, ‘void’, ‘access’ and ‘decant’, the reductive, blanket term ‘vulnerable’ seems to fall into this category.

Housing is a people business

The key to getting this right – so as to build and maintain trust – is to revisit the way organisations put and keep people at the centre of our industry.

Rather than viewing customers’ difficulties through a lens of failure or disadvantage (reinforced when it comes to another key service like income management by words like ‘arrears’ and ‘struggle’), practice should be rooted in the inescapable reality that life always involves highs and lows. When faced with everyday obstacles, it’s entirely normal for people to feel anxious or exposed.

With this perspective, many of the Ombudsman’s other recommendations, such as new codes of conduct for staff and contractors visiting residents, trust recovery plans and more active, resolution-focused complaints handling are welcome.

In our work, we often remind housing clients that when something goes wrong with a home or service, the communication that follows needs to be the absolute best of which they’re capable. Again, the Repairing Trust report deftly puts its finger on the issue:

‘Landlords should recognise that when things go wrong, this will have impacted trust and it will take additional work and time to repair that trust. Good complaint handling is crucial in such circumstances. Bad complaint handling can erode or even destroy trust.’

Most of all, housing providers have to recognise that homes are emotional places, not just the physical structures suggested by that other unloved term ‘units’. Designing and delivering support to households based on a solid understanding of human psychology makes for a far stronger foundation, and more sustainable services with which people are more willing to engage.

Blended thinking and action

The persistently low scores for resident satisfaction with complaint handling and the relentless increase in the volume of customer complaints are proof enough that things need to change. Over the past five years, the Ombudsman has seen a 474 per cent increase in the number of referrals about repairs alone.

The way forward doesn’t involve a single shift; it’s about applying a thoughtful and sustained mix of behavioural science, cultural transformation and human communication to deliver better results. Without this, it could be that the social housing sector itself becomes ‘vulnerable’ – our desire to build millions more homes over the next generation stymied by stubborn shortcomings in customer service.

Trust is indeed the crucial piece of the puzzle.

To find out more about how Creative Bridge’s range of communication, change and behavioural support can help your business, please get in touch.