In the UK the shared living market has changed. No longer can landlords push outdated HMO’s and expect their rooms to fill. Coliving represents a seismic shift in customer-focused design. This new battle ground is no longer about product; it now encompases the entire customer experience and coliving community.

Building a thriving and engaged community requires design thinking spanning several disciplines. As a developer and operator, Co-Living Spaces uses a mix of both environmental space design and service design thinking to drive innovation within our end-to-end customer experience. Unlike traditional interior design, service design is a holistic approach that blends both the physical space and customer- centered insight. When developing coliving we use service design thinking to ensure that every part of the customer journey is optimised to help enable a community to form. Once developments are completed they are then handed over to our in-house operations team and our community managers take over onboarding housemates and facilitating the community.

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Learnings From the Hospitality Sector

As owners and operators of several boutique hotels on the South Coast of the UK, we transfer many learnings across to coliving. In the hotel industry occupancy is affected by online customer reviews and there is an emphasis on giving the best possible experience for their stay to receive a positive review. The more positive reviews a hotel accumulates, the greater the enquiries and revenue as others look for social proof as part of their buying habits.

Given this focus on customer measurement and its impact on sales, hotels continually improve service and refine every aspect of the customer journey no matter how small. This mix of concierge support, digital onboarding, fast maintenance, technology and design is directly transferable to coliving when looking to improve the overall customer experience.

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Becoming Human Centered

One of the first stages of service design is to understand the customer and use empathy to design a product and service that is genuinely useful. We are looking to achieve a deep understanding of the customer journey and how they interact with our coliving brand. Unlike traditional HMO landlords who view tenants as a problem, coliving brands are putting the customer first and building long-term relationships.

To gather insight we gather customer research. Back in my days heading up innovation teams, our preferred method for gathering information was focusing on quick, cheap and easy to roll out techniques. Two of the key methods we use are unmoderated user surveys sent via email and moderated user interviews, which these days are conducted over Zoom. By utilising these simple techniques landlords and coliving operators can better understand the customer and spot opportunities to improve their community service.

An example of utilising research to inform service design is in our coworking spaces. Every year we run customer research to gather data looking for changes to customer needs. Several years ago we spotted that many of our tenants worked from home 1 or 2 days per week. Although in some cases we provide desks in the bedroom, this is not ideal for long periods of work. As an experiment, we created a dedicated coworking room to see how the space was used. After the success of our first coworking space many years ago we have rolled them out to other sites and had positive feedback from those who value a dedicated work space away from the main community space in the building.

The way we work is changing and post pandemic we will see more people moving to a flexible work arrangement. This human-centered design approach allowed us to spot an emerging trend that our research flagged up, we created a coworking prototype, ran an experiment, analysed the data then rolled out further refined versions across the community. This same process is used across both product and operations teams to create new services and facilities that benefit the customer.

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Understanding the Customer Journey

Within service design we look to identify all the touchpoints on the customer’s journey. We all interact with brands every day, however, we may not be aware of all the small touchpoints that happen along the way. Every one of these touchpoints affects our experience of the brand or product. The important takeaway here is that ‘experience’ is not exclusively the product but the whole end-to-end customer experience. This encompasses brand, marketing, product, operations and service.

Providing an amazing customer experience is a great way to differentiate your coliving communities from the competition. Customers will no longer just compare your coliving brand on price and finish but on service and community experience. You need to think of customer experience as part of your overall brand experience. Customers will build affinity to your brand through a variety of touchpoints on their journey. Your ability to delight at every stage of this journey is a game changer in building a tribe of happy customers.

A good example of refining the customer journey is the work we do to improve the onboarding of housemates into a coliving community. By analysing every stage of the journey we were able to utilise technology to create a 6-step system of onboarding that helps introduce new housemates and orientate them to their new surroundings. Our 6-step onboarding system consists of the following:

1. Seamless tenancy document setup,
2. Introduction to other housemates,
3. Top tips on the local area and amenities,
4. Tour of the property,
5. Welcome pack and
6. Onboarding into the community group app.

This constant refining of our operations process leads to a better customer experience.

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Collaborative Design and Ideation

Fresh ideas are the lifeblood of any business: they can propel you to the top of the market and add rocket fuel to growth. Customer insight will provide validation; however, it’s our job to come up with new ideas. We call the process of creating new ideas ‘ideation’, however it can sometimes be referred to as ‘brainstorming’. It is one of the most exciting stages of the creative process and its aim is to come up with large quantities of new ideas that can be filtered down to the best ones that have an impact on the customer journey. Using service design principles, this process incorporates customer insight by a team made up of diverse backgrounds. It is this collaboration and insight that allows us to synthesise a broad range of concepts, uncover new angles, incorporate different perspectives and come up with unconventional business ideas.

A good example of our ideation is our concept of multi-use community spaces. Customers are looking for spaces that are flexible and adaptable to accommodate their needs. The basic principles of multi-use space can be seen all around us, from event venues being transformed into fitness spaces to cafes transformed into night time wine bars. This adaptability in the commercial world leads to increased revenue and higher footfall. Technology and modular construction allows you to create spaces that can be personalised in layout by your customer. With more people moving to urban centres, multi-use space design incorporates diversity, making buildings sustainable for the future. Single-use spaces are becoming a thing of the past!

Our coworking hubs perfectly demonstrate multi-use design. During the day these spaces – which include large workshop tables, private work pods and large monitors – can be used for coworking. During breakfast, lunch and dinner these same spaces provide overflow dining or serve as an additional breakout space with monitors that become TV’s. By providing multi-use spaces, housemates get more opportunities for community interaction and the ability to personalise their coliving experience.

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The Prototyping Mindset

At Co-Living Spaces we regularly run a whole range of experiments across both product and service.
An experiment can be anything from a new stage of onboarding or event ideas to coworking pods and digital apps. Early feedback will inform how future versions are designed and the effect it has on customer satisfaction. These early experiments test your initial assumptions and uncover insights that are sometimes unexpected. We call this approach ‘prototyping’. Prototyping is a powerful tool we use that allows us to experiment with new ideas to build a community, engage with the customer and constantly evolve our service.

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Brand Experience

The reason we became an operator and set up our own coliving operations agency was that there was no one offering a good service in our area of the UK. We wanted to ensure our customers received an amazing end-to-end customer journey. Given that we are developing the end product it made sense to connect both product and service for a more holistic approach to service design. There is no point creating a great product if the experience is bad. This is why Apple created Apple stores and Genius Bars to control all the touch points of the customer journey. Our focus is not on getting ‘x’ number of new leads per month, it is on how we can come up with new ways to delight the end customer. This human-centred approach has led to us getting high numbers of referrals for upcoming coliving projects and delivering beyond the customer expectation.

Our operations agency is made up of community managers, admin support and virtual assistants. Community managers organise a range of community events such as pizza nights, games nights, takeaway nights and interactive competitions with prizes. We regularly share promotions and discounts to the community on relevant services such as running clubs, gyms, bootcamps and car clubs. In many cases we have negotiated discounts that are passed onto the housemates. We operate a decentralised community model across the South East of the UK. All of our smaller coliving communities are interconnected and the community manager can arrange for any housemate to seamlessly transfer to another coliving space based on facilities, interests or location.

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Community Evolution

The last decade has seen a huge shift in both customer requirements and the evolution of the shared living product. As developers and operators we need to have one eye on the future to spot emerging customer trends. Your coliving service needs to evolve and adapt with every project to stay ahead of the curve! It is easy to think of coliving as larger purpose built shared living (PBSL) developments, however as the market matures, smaller coliving schemes of 6-20 units offer great flexibility with smaller communities and wider distribution across cities.

When utilising service design to build a community we are able to design products and services that help bring people together, foster collaboration and build relationships. It is this human-centered approach that constantly drives the evolution of community within coliving. Communities of the future will be very different to the ones of today; however, it is our job to continually explore the possibilities and experiment with new ways to improve our housemates’ experience. Coliving offers an amazing opportunity to redefine urban living and make a positive impact on people’s lives, and Co-Living Spaces is using human-centered spatial and service design approaches to support this housing evolution.