Learning from complaints

We’ve made some good progress on how we deal with your complaints in the last few months as we seek to not only deal with your complaints on time, but also to do what we can to put things right.

As always, our main aim with complaints is to learn something from each and everyone of them. Here’s what we’ve learned from your most recent feedback and what we’re doing about it:

Better communication

One of the areas where we’ve seen some dissatisfaction has come from some of our customers moving into new homes who have told us that some things are being missed or services aren’t quite meeting their expectations.

Most of these relate to questions around our grounds maintenance services, where customers are unsure what we’re meant to be doing for you. To clear this up, we’re conducting a review of these grounds maintenance contracts to see where the gaps are, with more site visits to make sure that work is being done to the standards we expect, and we’ll be making some changes to our communication to make sure customers understand what they get for their service charges.

Missed appointments

We have recently worked on some complaints that have told us that when there is a cancellation or we can’t get in for appointment, follow up appointments are not being booked. This leads to things like adaptations getting delayed, and we understand how frustrating this must be.

To stop this from happening, we’re creating a new process for when this happens to make sure that we contact you and make a new appointment.

In addition to this, we’ve also introduced clearer signs to highlight when customers need additional support or reasonable adjustments. This helps our contractors know more about any potential challenges when delivering services in our customers’ homes.

Record keeping

If you’ve read our previous blogs, you’ll know that record keeping is an area we need to improve on. New systems and training are being implemented to help us with this, so that when you get in touch with us, you won’t have to repeat yourself.

Connected to this is some refreshed GDPR training for all of our colleagues so that we know what we should and shouldn’t be doing when it comes to your data. This includes making sure we know who we’re allowed to pass your information onto based on what permission you’ve given us.

Moving home

We’ve been listening to what customers going through a mutual exchange have told us about their experiences, and it’s clear we need to improve communication.

Being more aware of individual circumstances and communication preferences will help us to speed up the mutual exchange process, which customers have told us is a source of frustration.

This has also been seen in management moves, and we’re now putting in place some more steps to our processes to make sure that customers are kept in the loop about what’s happening, such as confirming details in writing where necessary.

Mutual exchanges were the feature of one of our recent Live and Direct events. If you missed it, take a look here: