Scrutiny successes

Every few months, we like to check in with you to tell you how we’re doing in some of the crucial services that you interact with every day.

Customer Services

By offering their invaluable insight and experiences as Stonewater customers, our Scrutiny Panel, a team of 12 dedicated volunteers, is helping to improve what we do in crucial areas and make a difference to thousands of people across the country.

Regular readers of our newsletter, Here to Help, and our customer annual reviews will be familiar with some of the changes the Scrutiny Panel have helped us to make, but in case you missed it, here’s what they’ve achieved in the last few months:

Customer Services

The Scrutiny review of our Customer Services Centre has had some of the biggest impact on the way we deliver our customer experience, and having implemented the team’s recommendations, we’ve managed to:

decrease call waiting times significantly
improve the onboarding process for new colleagues to make sure they have the support to hit the ground running
update our telephony system

Based on the Panel’s recommendations, we launched an extensive recruitment campaign in 2023 to find new colleagues that could help us to support customers more efficiently, while making sure they shared our values of delivering excellent customer services. After an initial training period for our new colleagues, our customer satisfaction scores in this area have improved month on month and our average call waiting times have fallen.

Anti-social behaviour

The Panel asked us to make anti-social behaviour easier for customers to understand so that anyone experiencing this kind of issue knew more about what we can do to help, and what might need to be dealt with in a different way.

Thanks to this, we’re working with our teams to make sure customers and colleagues are fully aware of the thresholds for ASB and where else they can get support.

This has included creating a glossary of terms for anti-social behaviour so that customers are more familiar with some of the terms we use. This is now live on our ASB guide.

Another challenge that the Panel set for us was to look into the ways in which we can tackle nuisance caused by cannabis odours. We completed a report on different ways this can be tackled, and the neighbourhoods team is currently looking into some of these solutions.

Grounds maintenance

The Panel asked us to make more information about grounds maintenance available so customers understood our service standards and their local schedule better.

We launched a grounds maintenance schedule tool a few months ago, and an improved version will be made available in MyHome soon. We also updated our Estate Services guide, and shared with all customers. You can find it on our website.

Damp, mould and condensation

As part of a recommendation that reasonable adjustments information was made available to customers, we have updated our damp, mould and condensation policy to reflect this. The new policy is available on our website.

The Panel also asked us to make sure we’re promoting our damp and mould team and service to customers. We recently held a successful Facebook Live with the damp and mould team answering live customer questions.

Damp, mould and condensation

Rent and service charges

We worked closely with the Scrutiny Panel to improve our rent and service charge communications, with the aim of reducing the amount of queries we receive around this.

By updating things like our FAQs, making use of QR codes and updating our customer guides, we’ve been able to give customers the answers to those quick questions before they get in touch, reducing the overall number of queries and giving us more time to support customers with more complex issues.

This is just a glimpse of the work that the Scrutiny Panel does in driving improvements across Stonewater, and we thank each member of the team for their input, hard work and positive attitude to making things better.

For more information on the Scrutiny Panel, take a look at our website.