Putting customers first

Our Neighbourhoods and Specialist Housing Service, launched in January 2024, is fundamentally changing the way we manage our homes and neighbourhoods. We now have 55 neighbourhoods, each with an average of 750 homes (and some as small as 250 homes), allowing our neighbourhood officers to spend twice as much time helping customers and supporting our communities.

Our Customer Service Centre opened in January 2024. This move was supported by improvements to our customer relationship management system, giving our team access to customers’ case histories, including all outstanding complaints and repairs. By the year end, we were resolving more than 80% of customer enquiries during the first phone call.

 

Eighteen thousand households are now signed up to use MyAccount and, at the year end, a quarter of all customer enquiries are raised through digital platforms (where there was the option to do so). As well as being able to monitor their rent balance and make payments securely, customers can now book, track and reschedule repair appointments and raise complaints (and chat to a complaints officer online). They can also see a breakdown of their service charges. In 2023/24, 10,808 repair cases were raised via MyAccount, out of a total of 71,204 cases.

 

 

We received 2,638 reports of ASB in 2023/24, compared with 2,471 in 2022/23. Disappointingly, customer satisfaction with how we handled ASB cases fell this year, to 48% (2022/23: 67%). Many of the complaints and feedback we received centred around the time it took for us to respond to cases and how we communicated progress. To tackle this, we’ve transferred ASB case management onto our customer relationship management system, making it faster and easier to record and update cases.

 

We’ve focused on increasing our communications with customers about service charges this year, including holding in-person events, and have published detailed information on our website. We’ve also aligned the Service Charge team with our new neighbourhoods, so customers can get answers to their questions faster.

Our complaints performance continued to improve in 2023/24, with 81.2% of Stage 1 complaints responded within the Ombudsman’s target timescales, a significant improvement on 2022/23 (33.4%). We’ve made it easier for customers to raise a complaint, including through MyAccount, and the number of complaints we received continued to rise (6,201, compared with 3,249 in 2022/23). We recognise we've fallen short on occasion; we’re sorry for each and every time we’ve failed to live up to customers’ expectations.

A key focus for us this year has been to identify, and provide more support to, our most vulnerable customers. We now have more colleagues working in our specialist housing and later living schemes and neighbourhood officers carry out welfare checks on customers. Repairs colleagues can also report safeguarding concerns through their mobile devices when they visit customers’ homes.

This year, 1,496 customers took part in 3,338 customer involvement activities. We also welcomed one of our customers, Debbie Ellison, to the Board. Debbie will also serve on our Group Housing Services Committee.

We worked with Customer Voice, community partners, and tenants and residents’ associations to pilot our neighbourhood approach. As well as feedback surveys and drop-in sessions, a customer steering group reviewed progress and agreed recommendations for future services.

We also consulted with more than 1,000 customers about our new customer involvement strategy. Feedback was used to draft the six main themes of the strategy, due to be published in 2024.