Town & Country: from Excel hell to evidence-based action
Coding resident feedback by hand in spreadsheets is slow, inconsistent and impossible to trust at scale. Here's how Town & Country Housing turned thousands of comments into evidence its whole organisation could act on.
Town & Country Housing's insight team manually coded resident feedback in Excel, where inconsistent categorisation made the data unreliable. As open-comment volumes grew into the thousands, the spreadsheets became unmanageable — just as regulatory pressure increased to demonstrate a genuine understanding of resident satisfaction.
Theo Scott's team was responsible for turning resident feedback into something the wider organisation could act on. But the process relied on manually coding open comments in Excel — hours of work, and no two people categorising things quite the same way.
As feedback volumes grew, the spreadsheets became unmanageable and the inconsistency made trends impossible to trust. At the same time, regulatory pressure was rising to prove the organisation genuinely understood how its residents felt.
The solution
Wordnerds proved itself on a year of real data, then themed every channel automatically — straight into the dashboards the team already used.
Proof of concept first
A full year of transactional survey data was analysed before any rollout, so the team could see the value on their own feedback rather than take it on trust.
All sources, themed automatically
Resident feedback from every channel is brought together and themed automatically, with insight reports surfaced for the managers who need them.
Straight into Power BI
Qualitative insight is integrated into the team's existing Power BI dashboards, so the words sit alongside the numbers in the tools people already use.
The impact
Word-for-word evidence that got taps installed across an estate
When residents complained about dirty communal water, Town & Country Housing used Wordnerds' word-for-word evidence to challenge the contractor — leading to taps being installed across the estate. Using resident feedback as hard evidence is now embedded in how the organisation drives service improvements.
The clearest example came when residents raised concerns about dirty communal water. Rather than relying on a summary, the team could point to residents' exact words as evidence — and used it to challenge the contractor directly.
The result was tangible: infrastructure improvements, with taps installed across the estate. More broadly, feedback shifted from something to be reported on to evidence the organisation uses to hold itself and its suppliers to account.
About Town & Country Housing
Town & Country Housing manages over 13,000 properties across Surrey, Kent and Sussex, providing safe, comfortable homes with services shaped by resident feedback.
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