Making improvements to our services

On Monday 10 March, we’ll be starting our 2025 Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) survey.

If you don’t already know, TSMs help drive up standards and improve the quality of social housing by making sure housing providers like us are accountable for the services we deliver.

The surveys will be carried out on Voice, and by phone and email. As a thank you for completing the TSM survey, you will have the option to enter our prize draw with a chance to win one of 20 x £25 Amazon e-vouchers.

We’ll be posting more information on our website on Monday 10 March, so check back then if you want to know more. 

In the meantime, we’ve been working hard to improve our services. Here are a few of the things we’ve done in some of our key areas. 

Repairs

Last year, there was a small increase in satisfaction with our repairs service. However, we know that that we’re still a long way from where we want it to be.

Since then, we’ve looked at the reasons why repair appointments fail so we can fix the root causes. We’ve analysed lots of information about your repairs, including customer feedback from a Voice survey. This highlighted the areas where we can improve and where we’re not as efficient as we could be.

We also looked at how we could match our resources against demand, so it would take us less time to complete repairs. As a result, we’re creating a tool that will predict the number and type of repair jobs to expect. This will help us ensure we have the right resources available.

Anti-Social Behaviour

Last year, satisfaction with our approach to dealing with Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) went up. However, we know that there’s more we can do.

During the year we looked at how we gather information on ASB when investigating cases. This means we get clearer and more detailed information to assess the impact the ASB is having within the community.

We also started working with a company to help with conflict management. This is helping people manage relationships with neighbours and we are already seeing positive results so far. Out of the 33 cases that have gone down this route, 19 have been successfully results, and five are still underway. This is a really high success rate for mediation.

We recognise the impact ASB can have on people which is why we’ve halved our response time to victims of ASB from 10 days to 5.

We’ve also been rolling out improved training to our teams. Firstly, for our Tenancy Enforcement team so we can better support victims of ASB and work with perpetrators to improve behaviours. Secondly for a wider range of colleagues so they better understand the impact ASB has on communities.

Complaints and customer contact

Last year we knew a large number of our complaints were due to the consistency of communication. As a result we’ve held problem-solving workshops with colleagues around improving communications within the business.

Also highlighted last year was the need to provide better training for colleagues around handling customer complaints. We have now introduced complaints training for all operational colleagues, which encourages taking ownership of issues to avoid complaints arising.

A new customer service training course has been piloted to colleagues across the business. Feedback from this will be used to fine tune the course which will be rolled out with colleagues to enhance our customer service. Furthermore, our recent merger will allow us to take best practice from both Customer Service teams to bring benefits to our customers.

We are also carrying out a review of our customer portal to bring more and improved content to our customers 24/7, without the need to wait for our offices to open.