Your feedback
Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) are now live!
If you’re contacted and asked how you feel about the services we provide as part of the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures, please make sure you share your thoughts!
How we will use your feedback
We want to understand from customers what you think is working well to ensure we continue to do more of these things. We also want to understand what we might not be getting right and work with customers to improve and develop these services.
The Tenant Satisfaction Measures are a new set of measures introduced by the regulator to ask customers how they feel about the services their landlord provides.
The measures focus on five key themes:
- Keeping properties in good repair;
- Maintaining building safety;
- Effective handling of complaints;
- Respectful and helpful engagement;
- Responsible neighbourhood management.
From 1st April 2023 all social housing providers will need to ask their customers the questions outlined below and then report back to their customers, Boards and the regulator to share what you think about your landlord and how they are performing against these measures.
Great Places has been running a pilot over the last six months to assess how we are doing, working with a company called TLF who are experienced in running these types of surveys. They have been contacting customers by phone to ask the questions below and to understand the best way to undertake the survey going forward. TLF will continue to contact customers throughout the coming year. If you are contacted by TLF they understand that your time is precious. They will arrange to interview you at a time that suits you. Your opinions matter to us. We will dedicate time to reading all your scores and comments to understand how you feel and what we need to do differently – we are currently working on the feedback from the pilot to ensure we put relevant improvements in place.
The results of the pilot TLF Survey, taking in feedback from 1116 customers, can be found below:
(The percentages are the percent of customers who said they were fairly satisfied or very satisfied.)
- Taking everything into account, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the service provided by Great Places? 69%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the overall repairs service from Great Places over the last 12 months? 71%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the time taken to complete your most recent repair after you reported it? 72%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places provides a home that is well maintained? 75%
- Thinking about the condition of the property or building you live in, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places provides a home that is safe? 83%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places listens to our views and acts upon them? 65%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places keeps you informed about things that matter to you? 72%
- To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following ‘my landlord treats me fairly and with respect’? 77%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with Great Places approach to complaints handling? 32%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places keeps communal areas clean, and well maintained? 67%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places makes a positive contribution to your neighbourhood? 66%
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with Great Places approach to handling antisocial behaviour? 64%
Look out for more updates on the Tenant Satisfaction Measures in our upcoming magazines, E-news bulletins and website articles but in the meantime if you have any queries you can email involvement.team@greatplaces.org.uk
Complaints – how we’re doing
Although we always strive to provide excellent services, we recognise that sometimes there can be improvements to our service offer. We work with customers to get feedback and make improvements based on your experiences and suggestions.
We always want to be accountable and honest about where we could have done better, so we publish data on our complaints in our magazines, digital bulletins and on the website. Recently we have seen an increase in customer complaints.
Total complaints from 1st April 2022 to 31 March 2023 are 921 (this includes stage 1 & 2) compared with 434 for the same period last year.
Top 5 areas customers are unhappy with, from 1st April 2022 to 31st March 2023, are:
A spotlight on repairs
What’s the big picture around complaints in repairs?
We know the speed and quality of our repairs service is important to our customers. Our Repairs Team members receive the highest number of compliments that customers share with us. Our recent new Tenant Satisfaction Measure pilot survey tells us that of those customers asked, 71% are very satisfied or fairly satisfied with our service (see here for more).
But we know we don’t always get things right first time. Complaints in this area are generally around the time taken to complete a repair, which is usually due to additional work and appointments that are required to complete the work we need to do in your home to fix your problem. We have faced a number of challenges over the last six months, however we are committed to working with customers to put this right.
Why have we seen an increase in complaints in this area?
It’s due to a number of factors including:
- Increased demand for damp and mould inspections following our campaign for customers to report existing issues to us, and greater focus and scrutiny on the issue across the housing sector. We have experienced a 550% increase in requests since September, which has obviously created a significant backlog;
- Challenges of the current labour market, around recruiting the numbers of experienced skilled colleagues to deliver services that deal with the increased demand;
- The introduction of our new internal systems, which will ultimately result in a better service offer to customers but will take time to embed.
What are we doing about it?
We have got a plan in place to improve satisfaction with our repairs offer, including:
- Recruiting new colleagues to Great Places so we can attend more repairs appointments within our agreed timescales;
- Having dedicated Property Services Managers who are able to provide technical guidance and support in ensuring repairs are completed efficiently and to a high quality;
- Being clear with customers about our timescales for repairs, attending emergency repairs within 24 hours and more routine repairs within 20 working days;
- Enhancing our targets for the attendance for requests around damp and mould. Customers should now expect an appointment within a maximum of ten working days of reporting this to us.
How you can help us
- Please be available for your appointment time. Currently over 10% of the appointments we attend have to be reappointed due to the customer not being available. If you find you suddenly can’t be in at the agreed time, please give us as much notice as possible so we can rearrange.
- Give us as much information as possible when you report a repair. Having an accurate description of what repairs are actually required will ensure we can send the right colleague to the appointment, which will result in less disruption for our customers.
Top tips for getting in touch with our Customer Hub
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to get in touch with us but are currently experiencing high demand into our Customer Hub. We are working hard to address this through systems improvements and extra recruitment but here are some tips to remember:
- Give us as much information as possible when you report a repair. Having an accurate description of what repairs are actually required will ensure we can send the right colleague to the appointment, which will result in less disruption for our customers.
- If you want to phone us and wait times are long, we offer a same working- day call-back service that means you don’t have to stay in the queue.
- Mondays are our busiest days – if your query is not urgent you might be better to log it on a different day.
- We often see peaks in call volume from 9am-10am and between 3pm-4pm so avoid those times if at all possible.
Average call waiting times are currently around 15 minutes, which we are working hard to reduce.
We know that some of the current wait times, certainly when answering the phone at peaks times, are longer than we would hope for.
We are sorry about this and are doing all we can to bring our wait times back down to under 10 minutes.
We will continue to let you know how we are performing via our customer communication channels.
Working with you to combat anti-social behaviour and hate crime
Great Places understands how important it is to customers that you are able to live peacefully in your home and we appreciate how upsetting it can be if you are experiencing anti-social behaviour (ASB) or hate crime.
In winter 2022 Great Places invited customers to tell us what would be important if they needed to report ASB or hate crime to us. We then sent out a survey and more than 150 customers responded. They told us what had gone well, what they thought could have been done better and gave suggestions about what they would like to see in our service if they had to report ASB or hate crime to us again in the future.
Customers were keen to see more communication about what had happened after they reported ASB to us and to understand what action might be possible if the ASB continued. You also told us that it was important that we understand the impact that the ASB was having on your family’s lives.
We also asked our colleagues to tell us what they thought of the guidance they receive from Great Places about how they should respond to reports of ASB. This included the advice and support we offer to customers, where it might be possible for them to resolve low level ASB for themselves.
We are now using customers’ feedback to shape our new Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) and Hate Crime policy, alongside guidance based on your feedback to tell customers what you can expect from us if you need to tell us about ASB or hate crime. Reports of ASB can often mean dealing with challenging issues that we may not be able to solve on our own. We are committed to working with our customers and other agencies to ensure that we find the best possible outcome.
We’ll be sharing much more about our new policy and what this means for customers in the next few months and will give another update in the autumn edition of My Great Place magazine.
Compliments – in the words of customers!
It’s great to receive customer compliments for a job well done.
When a customer gives us a compliment we make sure that the relevant Great Places colleagues are recognised for their hard work. We will also look at how we can pass on the learnings from your positive experience for the benefit of other customers.
From April 2022 to March 2023 we received 839 compliments for our colleagues and services, which were very much appreciated. A snapshot of these are listed below.
