Learning from complaints

At Stonewater, we’re proud to make things personal. If it matters to you then it matters to us.

That’s why, when you make a complaint, we aim to put it right as soon as we can. We’re also committed to learning as much as we can from each and every complaint we receive so that we take steps to put them right and prevent them from happening again.

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.

Here’s what we’ve learned from your complaints in 2023-24:

Repairs

We understand just how frustrating it can be when something goes wrong and you just want it fixed. We appreciate that delays to your repairs can cause a great deal of stress, so it’s no surprise that this area gets the highest number of complaints.

To tackle this, we’ve been working closely with our contractors to find out how we can make sure that fewer repairs get delayed. One step we’ve taken is to appoint customer liaison officers, who are able to investigate why jobs are not being completed, and follow up where necessary.

We’ve also started using text messages to find out from you whether or not your job has been completed so that we can make sure that any follow-on work is organised without any further delays.

Damp and mould

Finding mould in your home can be very distressing, and with several high-profile cases in the media, it’s natural that people are worried. To make sure our customers feel confident that we can resolve the problem, we’ve introduced some added support for customers with damp and mould.

A new expert team, dedicated to damp, mould and condensation, was set up in October 2023 and has been supporting customers ever since, which has driven down the number of complaints relating to this issue. We have also introduced mandatory training for all colleagues, so everyone knows what to do when a customer reports they’re having problems with damp and mould.

Estate services

When you pay for a service, you expect value for money. When that service isn’t delivered to the standard you’d expect, it’s only normal to feel dissatisfied.

Listening to you, we’ve made some big changes to our estate services (which covers issues such as grounds maintenance and cleaning in communal areas), which have now been implemented following a rigorous re-procurement process.

An Estates Services Manager has been appointed to focus on this work and make sure these contracts deliver the quality and consistency we expect.

We’ve also developed a new reporting tool, making it clearer and easier for customers to not only tell us when we’ve missed something, but to get updates on the progress of their query.

Complaint handling

When something goes wrong and you need to complain, it can be doubly disappointing when there are delays to getting it resolved.

Like housing associations up and down the country, the number of complaints we received in 2023-24 has increased significantly, which has unfortunately meant that we’ve not always been as quick as we'd like to get your complaint sorted. This, coupled with changes to the way we work with the Housing Ombudsman Service, has led to further rises in complaints about how we’ve handled your queries.

To deal with this increased demand, we’ve recruited more colleagues, invested in better resources for us to have greater oversight of complaints, and delivered more training for our complaints team so they have a deeper knowledge of our customers’ issues.

If you want to see the full report on what we’ve learned from complaints in 2023-24, take a look here.