Customer Commitments

2023-24 has been a challenging year for the housing sector as we, like other housing associations, have had to adapt to some big changes.

Overall, we’ve seen a spike in demand for our services, which has placed pressure on us to deliver them. If you’ve read any of our previous blogs on our Customer Commitments, you’ll know that big increases in areas such as complaints, coupled with the challenges of delivering repairs in the current economic climate, have meant that we’ve had to rethink how we do things.

Working closely with our Customer Complaints Learning Panel, we listen carefully to what you’re telling us so that we can make improvements to our services.

We’ve recently reviewed how we did in 2023-24, and you can see the full results just here.

In the meantime, here’s a look at how we’ve done in the last three months:

Customer service

As we mentioned last time, we’ve made some great strides in terms of making sure that when you need us, you can get in touch quickly.

Lots of customers told us that it often took too long to get through on the phone, and we understand how frustrating that can be.

A review, led by our Customer Scrutiny Panel and based on customer feedback, recommended that to meet the extra demand, we needed to implement several changes to help us bring down call waiting times, get to emails faster and help to resolve queries at the first point of contact.

Throughout 2023-24, we ran an extensive recruitment campaign to attract new people into our customer services centre, and since January, we’ve managed to reduce waiting times significantly. In fact, during April to June of this year, the average waiting time on the phones has come down to under six minutes, which is a 64% reduction compared to our 2023-24 average.

This kind of progress is having a direct impact on our customer experience, and we’re delighted to see that our satisfaction score has increased in every quarter during the last year.

In the last three months, around 6,000 customers have joined MyHome, our digital customer portal, which is a great, easy way for customers to be able to resolve simple issues 24/7 without any call wait. It also means our team can spend more time with customers who need a bit more help because they have more complex issues, or don’t feel as confident online.

The introduction of MyRequests, currently used by around 500 customers per month, is something which I’m really pleased with, as it saves customers lots of time with simple requests such as permissions for things like sheds, or questions on parking.

Complaints

Last year, our team handled almost 4,000 complaints, more than we’ve ever done.

What this has meant is that it has become more difficult to keep up with demand, which is why our satisfaction score in this area isn’t where we’d like it to be. Improving customer satisfaction with complaints is a priority for the new year.

We also want to speed up how quickly we respond to you when you do get in touch to tell us something has gone wrong. As we receive most complaints around repairs, we’re making some changes to how we work. This includes recruiting more repairs specialists into the Customer Relations team, who manage our complaints.

That said, I’m really pleased with the gains we’ve made in complaints responded to on time. When you make a complaint, it’s only right that we let you know what’s happening with them, so we understand the importance of communication.

For more on complaints, you can read our 2023-24 wrap-up here and our Annual Complaint Performance and Service Improvement Report here, alongside our Board’s statement.

Repairs

As you’ll be able to see in our complaints report, we know that one of the biggest causes of frustration is appointments not being kept. We’re working hard to put this right.

New customer liaison officers, who work within our main repairs contractors, support us in investigating cases where things have gone wrong, such as missing an appointment and help us to make sure it’s put right quickly.

We’re also reaching out via text message to customers who have had a repair marked as complete, to make sure that jobs have either been done, or whether some follow up work is required. This is helping us to make sure you receive the best possible service.

That said, we’re pleased that our satisfaction score is at 85% (above our target of 84%) – this the highest score we’ve had during 2023-24.

Anti-social behaviour

It’s disappointing to see that our satisfaction score for ASB has fallen below our target of 60%.

This was the only time during 2023-24 that this happened, and we’re reviewing how we’ve handled cases during the last three months to find out how we can do better. We recognise that communication is key and we’re looking at how we can ensure that this is consistently as good as it can be.

ASB cases can be extremely time consuming and complex to sort out, and we appreciate that it can be very distressing and disruptive to experience.

During the last year, our Scrutiny Panel have been helping us to review our approach to ASB, helping us to refresh our Policy, information and guides making sure we’re as clear as possible about the action we can take to tackle this type of behaviour and how we can support customers. Take a look at our guide to ASB here.

We do so much good work within our communities to proactively tackle anti-social behaviour, 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.