Customer Commitments
October to December 2024
Welcome to our Customer Commitments blog, where we give you a snapshot of how we’ve been doing. Here’s how we did in the last three months of 2024.
Here for you
As the days got shorter, wetter and colder, and all of us spent more time inside our homes, we worked hard to meet increased numbers of calls and repair requests throughout autumn, to help make sure that your home is a warm, safe place to be.
We want to make sure that when you need us, you can get in touch quickly and easily.
From October to December, on average, we answered calls to our Customer Contact Centre in under seven minutes. This is a little above our norm and five-minute target and was mainly due to several weather events which significantly increased demand. We were pleased that, despite this, we retained good levels of satisfaction, with 87.5% of customers satisfied with our Customer Contact Centre.
By the end of December, we reached a total of 30,590+ customers registered for MyHome, our secure online customer portal. With MyHome, you can quickly and easily report repairs, make payments or check your account, 24/7, without any call wait. MyRequests can also save you lots of time with simple requests such as permissions for things like sheds, or questions on parking.
Complaints
From October to December, we worked hard to respond to complaints quicker and saw the number of complaints we received decreasing. With better reporting tools and extra training for our teams, we made a significant improvement in this area.
We acknowledged just under 99% of formal complaints on time, and responded to 98.2% of formal complaints on time, both beating our 95% targets. This improvement shows in your feedback too – 72% of customers asked were satisfied with the way we handled their complaints from October to December, well above our target of 60%!
In 2024, our Customer Complaints Learning Panel (CCLP) was set up to look at our complaints service, tell us what’s going well, and what needs improvement.
The panel, made up of customer volunteers, reviewed cases across multiple service areas and shared what we needed to do to improve. So far, the panel have looked at how we can improve how we communicate with you, how we handle anti-social behaviour (ASB) cases and have given us feedback on closed complaints to let us know how we could do better.
Based on the panels feedback, we’ve set actions in motion that we’ll keep working on and tracking over the next six months.
If something’s gone wrong, and we’ve been unable to make it right, you can make a formal complaint. We’re committed to learning from every complaint we receive.
You can make a complaint by:
- Completing the form on our website here
- Emailing us at customers@stonewater.org
- Calling us at 01202 319 119
- Writing to us at: Stonewater, Suite C, Lancaster House, Grange Business Park, Enderby Road, Whetstone, Leicester, LE86EP
- By sending us a private message on Facebook
Repairs
We know that delivering excellent repairs and appointments being kept is really important to you, and that repairs are one of the main causes of frustration for you. In autumn, outstanding repairs accounted for 46% of all complaints.
We usually see the number of complaints we receive around repairs going up as we head into autumn and winter. This is often due to the higher demand on our repairs service in these months – colder temperatures can cause things like frozen pipes, leaks and other weather-related problems and alert you to problems with your boiler or radiators.
While we still have work to do in this area, we’re pleased to have seen an improvement when compared to the same time in 2023. One of the ways we’re working towards a better service for you is through colleague training to help to resolve the complaint from the first time you contact us.
81% of customers asked said that they were satisfied with responsive repairs from October to December.
Our customer liaison officers, who work with our repair's contractors, continue to support us with investigating cases where things have gone wrong, such as missed appointments, and helping us to find out how we can improve.
Anti-social behaviour
We’re really pleased to share that our satisfaction score for anti-social behaviour improved between October and December with 73.1% of customers satisfied with how we handled their case! This score exceeded our target of 60%.
We continue to work hard to resolve ASB cases wherever possible and constantly review how we handle cases to learn how we can do better. We recognise that communication is key, and we want to ensure that it is as consistently as strong as it can be.
We do so much work in our communities to proactively tackle ASB, working with our partners and using the tools available to us. We recognise a need to share this more so you can see it and feel more assured around our approach to this issue. We will be doing this by sharing regular updates in our Here to Help newsletters, as well as on the customer hubb.
We have also made some changes to our team to improve oversight and locality working, with team members now working in regional hubs to build even stronger local relationships.
Reviewing our commitments
We’re working with customers to review our customer commitments to make sure they give you all the information you need to know. If you’ve got feedback on the commitments infographic or blog let us know on customer.communications@stonewater.org
Tenant Satisfaction Measures
The Regulator of Social Housing is an organisation that checks how well social housing landlords, like us, are doing at providing good quality homes and services.
They’ve created a set of measures, called Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs), that we have to report on. These cover things that matter to you, like repairs, complaints and anti-social behaviour.
To report on how we’re doing, we have to collect certain information.
We do this in two ways:
- Some of it is based on “management information” for example, the number of complaints received per 1000 homes.
- The rest of it is collected by surveying our customers about how they feel about our most important services.
You may receive a call from our partners at TLF to ask you to answer a few questions on how you feel about our service, based on your own personal experiences.
If you do get this call, we’d really appreciate if you could spend a few minutes telling them how you feel – all of your feedback helps us to improve our services.