Customer Influence
Your voice, your opinions and your needs matter. Feeling you're being heard and having an impact is a powerful thing.
What is customer influence?
Customer influence is the difference made because of customer engagement as well as how we notice and act on customers’ expectations, experiences, and needs from other information and data. Customer influence creates the focus we need to deliver more outcomes that are important to you.
It means your opinions and feedback help us make decisions and improve services. You get a say in how things are done here.
Customer co-creation
Bringing customers and staff together can and will shape the services, solutions and decisions that work best for everyone, and impact on your homes, communities, and neighbourhoods.
During the past year, 2023/24, we have worked closely with a range of our customers, as part of panels and select groups, neighbourhood volunteers, resident groups and a series of surveys.
We hear every customer’s voice, to listen and act upon it. Our Service Standard target is for 1,000 or more customers to be part of our group of involved customers. We're pleased that we currently have 1,456 involved customers who have their say on our services and provide great insight. We've also continued to hear and take action as a result of feedback and insight from many more of you through regular customer satisfaction surveys.
Here are some examples of how you have helped us shape our services:
Prioritising service improvements
Through the feedback many customers give us via our regular customer satisfaction surveys, you provided us with invaluable insight on what’s most important to you in respect of the homes and services we provide. As a result, the priority for every single one of our people over the year has been on improving customer experience, focusing on 3 service areas: ensuring services are easy to use and access, keeping customers informed, and the speed in which routine repairs are completed. This feedback has always been and continues to be fundamental in helping us shape our services, and by working even more collaboratively together, we’re well on the way to modernising and transforming the experience customers have when interacting with us.
Improving our repairs service
We introduced a project team to address our level of outstanding repairs. We hired contractors and additional trade staff to reduce the volume, while being well managed to ensure we meet expectations and service standards. Progress is being made, and in parallel to this, we're transforming our processes and technology to enable us to complete a repair on first visit as often as possible by ensuring we get the right trade to the right repair job with the right materials.
New and easier ways to contact us
You told us that it’s important to be able to contact us easily and answer queries quickly, which resulted in us launching our new and improved ways to contact us in November 2023. This included a new online account, live chat on our website and WhatsApp to enable photos and video calls. Your views and feedback were sought at stages throughout the process. We had responses from 75 customers from a survey we conducted before the new contact methods were introduced and afterwards to gain their views and help refine what was developed. We promoted this survey through our customer newsletter. We also ran 4 sessions including customers to show the design and how it worked as part of user accepting testing before the new contact methods were launched.
Chat
“Used the chat service and it took 4 minutes to solve my query- great service! Fast and efficient!”
April 24
“Excellent communication via WhatsApp with Dean to rebook my gas service.”
March 24
Phone
“The lady was extremely helpful and helped me to try and solve the issue I have. Polite and happy person she deserves 10 out of 10 for customer service.”
June 24
Customer Influence strategy
We've developed a customer influence strategy that sets out what we'll do to improve how we listen and act on the feedback and insight you provide us with. This builds on the strong foundations we already have in place because we care about you. Your experience and insight is invaluable in helping us improve. We want to work in partnership with you; to collaborate to make positive changes, raise standards, and to demonstrate how we truly put you, our customers, at the centre of what we do.
This strategy sets out our commitment to listen, understand, learn, and act on customers' voices. Our vision is to ensure that you influence and shape the services we provide and decisions we make about homes, communities, and neighbourhoods.
Delivery of the Customer Influence strategy will enable us to achieve our corporate plan and vision for ‘more homes, bright futures’ and our ambition that customers are our strongest advocates, centred on building trust, pride and impact.
This strategy will be delivered over the next four years with everyone working together to achieve the purpose, aims and objectives.
We're also working towards TPAS Resident Involvement Accreditation for Landlords. By completing this accreditation, we'll demonstrate our commitment to customer involvement and ensure our approach is effective and offers the best value for money.
We will share changes and progress, through our e-newsletters, printed newsletter, social media and on our website.
