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Faced with the constant increase in tenant requests, social housing providers, ESH and OPH must find effective ways to respond without compromising service quality. Self-care then emerges as a logical solution, giving tenants the ability to carry out simple everyday tasks on their own while reducing the workload of staff. But how does self-care actually work in social housing?
Self-care refers to the set of digital solutions and tools that allow tenants to manage part or all of their procedures independently, without having to contact their landlord, ESH, or OPH. In the social housing sector, it relies on tools that are becoming increasingly comprehensive and accessible.
One of the key elements is the digital tenant portal, a true centralized platform where tenants can consult their account, download a lease or receipt, report a technical issue, or even make a payment. Thanks to this portal, each tenant can track their requests and ongoing interventions in real time, without needing to follow up with customer service.
Mobile applications reinforce this autonomy by making these services available at any time, directly from a smartphone. Added to this are intelligent FAQs, AI agents, and visual IVRs, capable of instantly answering the most common questions or guiding tenants to the right procedure.
This range of tools helps simplify daily life, provide greater transparency, and significantly reduce the administrative workload of teams, allowing them to focus on higher value-added tasks and human support.
In the daily operations of social landlords, a large share of incoming requests relates to simple, repetitive issues: checking the rent withdrawal date, obtaining a certificate, or tracking the progress of a technical intervention. While these requests are important for tenants, they consume significant time and energy on the landlord’s side.
By providing tenants with self-care tools, these processes can be automated or made available in self-service. This greatly reduces the volume of incoming calls or emails, while improving perceived responsiveness. Teams are no longer overwhelmed by repetitive demands and can refocus their efforts on mediation or supporting more vulnerable tenants.
This approach also helps to rebalance the workload across different contact channels: staff gain time to handle more complex situations, while tenants become more autonomous in managing routine requests without having to rely systematically on an intermediary.
Self-care stands out above all for its direct impact on the quality of tenant management. By giving tenants simple, fast, and autonomous access to essential services, it transforms the relationship between tenant and landlord often perceived as impersonal or unresponsive into an exchange that is faster and more balanced. With instant access to clear information and straightforward procedures, available at any time, tenants are no longer constrained by customer service opening hours or lengthy response times. This permanent availability helps ease frustrations linked to waiting, while reinforcing trust and a sense of control in the relationship with the landlord.
Moreover, being able to solve everyday issues independently such as retrieving a certificate or tracking an intervention enhances the overall tenant experience. Tenants are no longer passive in front of an institution often perceived as slow or opaque; instead, they take matters into their own hands and easily access the information that concerns them. According to HubSpot, around 75% of French customers prefer to solve problems on their own, in full autonomy.
Conversational agents can personalize responses based on the tenant’s profile, history, or situation, while visual IVRs redirect calls toward digital journeys (FAQs, forms, messaging...). This makes it possible to adapt each user’s path while ensuring consistency in request handling. These tools fit into an omnichannel journey logic, where every touchpoint: digital, phone, or physical, is interconnected. This continuity of service prevents breaks in the process, ensures better traceability of interactions, and contributes to a smoother, unified experience across all channels. The combination of process transparency and personalized interactions strengthens overall service efficiency while improving the user experience.
The implementation of self-care enables social landlords to streamline their operational costs while maintaining a high level of service quality. By automatically handling the most common requests, digital and artificial intelligence (AI) tools prevent teams from spending valuable time on repetitive tasks, without leaving tenants without an answer.
This reallocation of time and skills not only optimizes human resources but also improves the overall efficiency of services. As a result, teams gain new skills and expertise, becoming more available and engaged on essential topics. From a budgetary perspective, this translates into reduced management costs without weakening the quality of tenant relationships. On the contrary, human time is reinvested where it matters most.
Self-care is gradually redefining the tenant’s role in their relationship with the landlord. It is no longer just about waiting for a situation to evolve, but about being able to act directly on everyday procedures. With self-care, tenants can be guided through their processes without delay and from any device. This permanent availability of services provides greater autonomy as well as comfort: no need to visit an agency or wait on the phone for a simple answer. Tenants keep control over their housing journey, anytime and with complete ease.
This increased autonomy also comes with a real time saving. Waiting lines and unnecessary back-and-forth are avoided. Interventions can be scheduled according to the tenant’s availability, which improves service efficiency while respecting individual constraints.
However, this digital autonomy does not make human support obsolete. On the contrary, it helps better target human intervention where it is most useful.
In this new model, the role of the landlord, ESH, or OPH is no longer limited to technical management. They act as facilitators, stepping in at the right moment, in a way that is targeted and adapted to tenant needs. Far from dehumanizing the tenant–landlord relationship in social housing, self-care strengthens it: ensuring better follow-up, greater availability, and more relevant interactions, at the right time and through the right channel.
"Thanks to DialOnce’s conversational agent, we have not only improved the accessibility and responsiveness of our service, but also optimized the management of incoming requests, allowing our tenants to get instant answers to their queries, 24/7. This project has been a real driver for enhancing the customer experience with AI while keeping our operational costs under control."
Maud Flory-Boudet
Head of Multichannel Customer Relations, 1001 Vies Habitat
Self-care has now emerged as a concrete response to the challenges faced by social landlords. By making services more accessible, it helps improve the relationship between landlords and tenants, which is often put to the test. It strengthens tenant autonomy, lightens the workload of teams, and enables a simpler service that is more aligned with tenants’ current expectations. But to be truly effective, self-care cannot stand alone. It must be part of a hybrid model that combines digital and AI tools with high-quality human support.
