Listening to customers to shape our services

In October we celebrated National Customer Services Week by highlighting the services that we provide to customers to make life easier and help us continually improve.

One of the improvements we have made to enable customers to contact us is the introduction of a Live Chat facility onto our website. It’s much quicker than contacting us by phone and is available on a mobile phone, tablet and laptop from 8am – 6pm Monday to Friday.

We’ve also made it easier for customers to manage their home and tenancy through our designated secure customer portal, with over 5,000 customers already signed up and already taking advantage of using the facility. Be it reporting a repair or checking a rent balance, it is available anywhere and anytime, as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection. Our plan now is to make this available for former Equity customers. Whilst it’s still early days, we are working on a project to enable customers to directly book their repairs appointment through an online repairs scheduling tool. This is likely to launch in 2022 so watch this space.

Listening to what you have to say is important to us and our established customer scrutiny group, Insight, has contributed throughout the year to shaping how we work and holding us to account. Insight is a volunteer group of customers keen to help improve services delivered to other Great Places customers. The group regularly carries out reviews using feedback gathered from customers, colleagues and recorded performance information, to identify potential areas for improvement. The work that the group carries out is invaluable to our organisation and we appreciate the time they volunteer to help us shape the services we provide to customers.

Over the last year, the group have reviewed a number of areas including our approach to the consultation and creation of our anchor neighbourhood plans. They also reviewed our response to the Coronavirus pandemic and researched how the response to the pandemic was co-ordinated, agreed and implemented, explored how customers were supported and kept up to date, and reviewed customers’ experience of service delivery during this time of uncertainty. Learning will be implemented as a result of these reviews.

In addition, we have also carried out various reviews of our services, engaging with customers to find out what is important to them. Over 210 customers shared their experience and thoughts on our review of the Repairs service and over 300 customers have told us their views on our services as a shared ownership or leaseholder. We also carried out a review of our sheltered and older persons housing schemes and customers shared their feedback on the service they receive and how this could be improved.

At the end of last year, we undertook a customer satisfaction survey with our customers that reviewed the performance of our three facilities management services; these were grounds maintenance, caretaking, cleaning and window cleaning.

The satisfaction of our Grounds Maintenance service was not to the level that our customers expect and therefore we decided to pilot bringing the service in house. We believe this offers us greater control of the service and it gives us the ability to enhance and tailor our offer, to site level, for the benefit of our customers, for the same cost.

Earlier this year our grounds maintenance pilot went live across several sites in and around both South Manchester and Sheffield and given a challenging start due to the pandemic, we are now starting to see the benefit of the service coming in-house. We are receiving numerous compliments when out and about on our sites in the area of the pilot.

We will decide in the coming year how we deliver our grounds maintenance service across all our schemes.