Multi-disciplinary Team Pilot
Trying something new
We know that you value ‘go to contacts’ who you can trust and who know the community.
Improvement in customer satisfaction
In 2021, we moved away from having housing officers looking after small patches of homes to having national specialist teams focused on tenancy issues such as neighbourhoods and anti-social behaviour.
We did this because we recognised that, although our teams were great, like all of us they had things they were better at than others. For example, being brilliant at dealing with tenancy issues but less confident when it came to anti-social behaviour, causing some inconsistencies. We also recognised that small patches didn’t work because our geography meant we could end up having colleagues travelling for hours for a single visit, which wasn't the best use of your money.
Since making the change, we’ve been having good customer feedback about the specialist teams, but you also told us that you didn’t always know who to contact, that we weren’t visible enough, and lacked the local knowledge that you’d expect.
Your feedback also told us that some customers were sometimes being passed between specialist teams when they had a number of issues.
Listening to these points, we started a pilot in Somerset in January 2024 to trial a new way of working.
This pilot brought specialist colleagues together from Tenancy, Neighbourhoods and Resolution (Anti-Social Behaviour) to manage all cases in the area. This enabled us to tell customers who to contact, helping us to build closer relationships with customers as well as partners such as the local authority.
We’ve also been able to keep customers more up-to-date with local issues and build local action plans to address neighbourhood issues. Over the first three months of the project, we’ve been really pleased to see a 22% increase in customer satisfaction.
We’re now working with our Customer Scrutiny Panel to look at the data on volumes of homes and cases to see how we can extend this approach.
