Tenant Satisfaction Measures

We use a range of methods to survey our customers. Most surveys are completed over the telephone. Some are completed online using an email link. A small proportion are carried out face-to-face by Hyde colleagues to help with accessibility and inclusion.

This year, we used an independent and accredited market research company called In-house Research to carry out the TSM surveys. It’s the same team who carry out our service satisfaction surveys with customers, for example following a repair.

We also asked another market research company, TLF Research, to carry out a small sample of telephone surveys to give us assurance that our results were consistent.

The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) requires us to survey a sample of our tenants living in ‘low-cost rental accommodation’ (including general needs, affordable rent, independent living, supported housing, intermediate rent and temporary social housing) and those living in ‘low-cost home ownership’ (shared owners).

For a landlord of our size, we’re required to survey 2,233 tenants and 517 shared owners.

In 2023/24, we surveyed 2,299 tenants and 519 shared owners.

We include a range of customers and homes to make sure the survey results are a true reflection of our performance. For example, if 40% of customers live in two-bedroom homes, we aim to include 40% of these customers in the survey.

We check our sample is representative against these categories:

• Stock type (tenure)
• Building type (flat, maisonette, house etc)
• Property size
• Geographical area
• Age of customer
• Ethnicity of customer.

When our research company makes telephone calls to ask to conduct a survey, a computer-generated random sample is used to select who to call. This is best practice.

Some customers have asked us not to contact them for research purposes, so they are excluded from surveys. In 2023/24, 111 tenants and six shared owners asked to be excluded.

In 2022/23, we carried out an ‘easy-read’ survey of 368 supported housing tenants and used this to create an action plan to address their feedback. Because we have a plan in place (and because the guidance says we can’t include scores from ‘easy-read’ surveys), we excluded them from this year’s TSM survey.

We also didn’t include 318 tenants and 42 shared owners who had an open complaint case or were in legal dispute with us. We were concerned that asking these customers questions could annoy them and they would give a biased response.

We ran a small trial with tenants in December 2023, offering a £10 incentive to participate in the research; 33 customers responded. This indicated that incentives wouldn’t improve responsiveness. And, as our research provider was able to complete the bulk of the survey without incentives, we decided not to incorporate these into our approach.

No incentives were used in our surveys of shared owners.

This year, we carried out tenant surveys between 28 November 2023 and 25 March 2024, and shared owner surveys between 9 January 2024 and 8 March 2024.

Most telephone surveys take between 8 and 15 minutes, depending on how much feedback we receive.

Face-to-face surveys take about 30 minutes and usually take place in a customer’s home.

All landlords ask the same questions, following guidance from the Regulator of Social Housing. This means customers can compare the performance of different housing providers.

We also ask some questions to help understand why people give the scores they do.

The questionnaire is similar for tenants and shared owners, although shared owners aren’t asked questions about repairs in their homes, because they’re not our responsibility.

You can download a copy of the survey questions here (PDF, 146KB)

At the end of the research, if one customer group isn’t accurately represented in the responses, we can add extra value (or ‘weight’) to that group, to make sure they have the correct impact on the overall score.

We monitored this during the 2023/24 survey, to make sure we had a true representation of all our customers. That means we haven’t had to add a weighting to our results this year.

Our Customer Research team works closely with our research providers to monitor survey results against the Regulator of Social Housing’s requirements. Our Risk and Governance team also audits the results to make sure they’re accurate.

TSMs will help us to shape the improvements we’re delivering to better meet the needs of our diverse customers and their communities.

TSMs are designed to help our customers understand our performance and to hold us to account, so publishing and promoting these is a vital part of improved transparency.

We report our TSMs to the Hyde Group Board and our customer involvement groups.

We provide more detailed analysis to help us understand the views and priorities of different types of customers living in different types of homes, in different places.

We share our approach and experiences with other housing providers, to help with learning and best practice.