When lockdown began in spring 2020, we were in a good place to quickly adapt our services. We monitored the situation and planned ahead as much as possible to manage the impact to our services and keep our customers updated.
The health, safety and wellbeing of our customers and colleagues is our priority. This meant when we temporarily paused some of our services at the start of the pandemic, and where possible we moved visits to phone and video appointments. We carried out critical repairs, and then brought the rest of our services – such as grounds maintenance and planned works – back in stages as we eased out of lockdown. Like the whole sector, and as anticipated, our customer satisfaction results saw some impact due to the challenges of the pandemic.
We want customers to have a fantastic experience with us from start to finish so we measure a lot of different things. Our measures include the quality and safety of your home, feeling part of a community, value for money, how much customers feel listened to and if we’re easy to deal with.
We tend to share our overall satisfaction rating, but you’ll see there’s a lot that goes into making that number. And no one area is more important than the other, it all matters to us. And we have lots of different types of customers, from those in social and market rent houses, housing for older people and customers who own, or part own, their home.
Everyone’s feedback is valuable, so we capture it all. But we tend to separate our figures out by rental and ownership customers. This is done because both groups have very different needs. By separating the two we can break down the satisfaction measures and get an accurate picture of where we’re doing well and where we need to improve so we can make sure everyone is happy.
And to go that bit extra and deliver a fantastic service, we try to make sure any issues or questions are resolved at first point of contact. This means that whether a customer uses our live chat on the portal or gives us a call, we aim to help there and then to make things convenient and overall, a great experience.
In the past year the pandemic has clearly had an impact on our customer satisfaction results. And we haven’t always got it right when we’ve managed complaints and delivered services. We’re sorry for this and are working closely with our customers and colleagues to learn and improve what we do so it can be the very best.
In June and July 2020 we saw 80.2% and 81.1% rental customer satisfaction respectively, however in August saw a dip to 76.8%. This was likely due to our decision to limit our repairs service to support us with clearing our backlog from the first lockdown. This decision was made to ensure those who had outstanding repairs were supported before new repairs were carried out.
As we started to provide more services, our satisfaction increased. This reached 81.2% rental satisfaction in February 2021 before dipping to 79.9% rental satisfaction in March, which coincided with annual rent and service charge increases made in compliance with the Rent Standard.
Our colleagues work hard to support our customers and during the 2020/21 year 85.4% of customer queries were resolved at first point. We’ll continue to use insight from our customers to better what we do, to ensure we’re delivering the best we can for everyone.
