Customer commitments

Customer Services

As you can see, we’ve made some fantastic progress when it comes to delivering your customer services.

Our new customer services colleagues, who were recruited and trained throughout 2023 and early 2024, are helping us to not only keep our satisfaction scores above target, but they have also had a massive impact on the speed at which we get back to you. To have reduced our call waiting times by 22% is really pleasing to see, and I want to say a huge than you to everyone in our customer services centre for their hard work in making sure we respond on time. This performance has set us up as we go into the winter months, traditionally our busiest time of the year.

Of course, we still want to improve this further, but I’ve been really impressed with the upward trajectory that we’ve seen in the last few months as we look to help all of our customers with their queries.

Complaints

If you have read any of our previous Customer Commitments blogs, you’ll see that the way we handle your complaints has been through some major changes over the past year.

Our team handled around 4,500 complaints in 2023-24, and we’ve made it our mission to learn something from each and every one of them.

One of the things that customers have been telling us is that they wanted more calls and to follow up and discuss complaints, so we now ask our Customer Relations Team to contact every customer when they first make their complaint. This is one of the reasons for the upturn in satisfaction that we can see in the chart below.

We’re still a way off where we’d like to be, but the 15% increase from our last results shows we’re heading in the right direction, with changes like this shaping the service we deliver to you.

You can have a look at what we’re learning from your complaints in more detail here.

Anti-social behaviour

Together with the help of our Scrutiny Panel and our Customer Complaints Learning Panel, we’ve been taking a closer look at our approach to anti-social behaviour (ASB to see how this can be improved.

Your feedback has told us that we need to be clearer about ASB, specifically when we can help and when we need to reach out to other agencies and organisations. This work is ongoing, with some changes to our ASB guide and the creation of a new glossary so that customers can see what we mean when we use certain terms.

We’re also exploring some new elements to our ASB service to support you, and we hope that these steps can help to improve satisfaction and provide effective support to our customers.