We sat down with Emily Riley, our Head of Customer Experience, to discuss the changes we’ve made because of customer feedback and why every complaint is an opportunity to learn.
Why are complaints important?
Complaints are really important to us because they tell us a few things. They show us where things may not have worked as they should, what we need to improve or where we’re might not be meeting our customers’ needs.
While it’s never nice knowing a customer is unhappy with us, we see complaints as opportunities to listen and learn. They’re a chance to hear directly from customers, listen to their views and understand where things might not be working so well.
Our Complaints team looks carefully at each complaint and works with the customer and our internal teams to see what needs to be put right – but the work doesn’t stop there.
Then it’s about making sure we’re seeing what we might need to do differently. Customers know their home and our services best, so all customer feedback – the good and the bad – is really valuable to us.
Are there any common themes customers have been raising complaints about?
One of the biggest themes is communication. Last year nearly 30% of complaints were because of poor communication. Communication is quite a broad word, but more specifically, either when customers had to contact us more than once about the same issue or they didn’t know what was happening with their query.
We’ve also had complaints about the length of time for some larger repairs to be completed, antisocial behaviour and some of the work carried out by our contractors.
We’ve spent time understanding the driver of these themes, smaller changes ae happening all of the time, but larger changes can take time.
Tell us more about this, what changes have been made?
The biggest change is a new way of working in our Customer Services team. A small number of team members tested what it would be like to give customers who call us a single point of contact. So, if the call was about something we couldn’t answer there and then, we’d be the ones to call them back and the team member would be their main point of contact until the query’s resolved.
This testing went really well, in fact it went that well we’ve now rolled this out across the whole Customer Services team. It’s quite exciting seeing this change happen as it should make things feel much easier for customers. There’ll be no more passing customers between different teams, and most importantly, we’ll be the ones to call them instead of customers having to chase us.
What are you doing about the other complaints themes you mentioned?
We’ve already started on this too. For antisocial behaviour (ASB), customer feedback led to a full review of the process. We’ve given extra training to colleagues and completed our first customer-led scrutiny workshop on ASB. We’re already seeing signs of improvement from this which is great, as satisfaction of our handling of ASB went up 5% in our latest Tenant Satisfaction Measures.
We’ve also got a project group set up to review the contractor process, understand with customers and contractors what the barriers are and work to address these.
How else do you know these changes are making a difference?
We know customer satisfaction is increasing as we received the brilliant news our overall satisfaction score for our Tenant Satisfaction Measures is now up to 80.4% - almost another 5% increase!
We also look closely at decisions from the Housing Ombudsman Service, which independently reviews complaints from housing association customers. Only a small number of our complaints are escalated to the Ombudsman – less than 1% - and our recent determinations show where we may have done something wrong, we responded fairly and reasonably or took the right steps to put things right during the complaint process.
This is really encouraging to see, as it shows we’re listening, understanding of our customer’s worries or concerns, and we’re responding in a fair way – which is exactly what a Complaints team should do!
What's your message to customers?
Please keep giving us feedback. Whether that’s a complaint, compliment, sharing ideas on My Voice, or looking at our services in our scrutiny workshops, your feedback genuinely helps us improve. And I hope what we’ve talked about today shows that!
If you'd like to get involved with shaping our services, then please let us know! Click here and scroll to the bottom of this page to say what you're interested in.
