Customer commitments – Q4 2022/23
So that we can keep you up to date about how we’re performing in some of our key services, every quarter we produce our customer commitments.
Below you’ll see our latest results for the past three months across customer services, repairs, complaints and anti-social behaviour, giving you an insight on how we’re doing and why we’re seeing these results.
Customer services
It’s really pleasing to see that, generally speaking, our customer service team has improved its scores over the last quarter. It has been exceptionally busy over the past three months, with the team handling around 67,000 queries during this time.
We’ve been better at responding to you on time, have seen a better satisfaction score in the last quarter, and have also responded to emails faster.
The phone lines have been extremely busy recently as we’ve been working hard to support customers with rent and service charge queries, and this has meant that our response times on social media have been slower compared to the last period.
We’re working hard to cut these waiting times down, and we’re working with our Scrutiny Panel to find ways to do that. We’ll have more updates on this project later in the year.
If you do have an issue that you need to speak to us about, our quieter times are usually in the evenings and on Saturday mornings and, if you haven’t got time to wait, you can use MyHome to report issues and make payments, or send an email to customers@stonewater.org and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
Repairs
We know how important it is to you that repairs get sorted when you tell us there’s something that needs fixing.
In the last three months, we’ve completed 26,600 repairs and, coupled with the amount of customer queries we received during this time, shows how hard we’re working to get your repairs sorted. Even though our overall satisfaction score has dipped slightly, we’re pleased to see that there’s only been a small change, and we know there’s more we can do.
Because of the cost and availability of materials and skilled tradespeople, we’re seeing delays to some of the jobs that you tell us about. We’re working on ways we can keep you better informed about these delays based on your feedback. You can find out a bit more about this on our complaints learning blog here.
This is also why we’ve seen a three per-cent decrease in appointments being kept, which we know is frustrating, especially when you’ve taken time out of your day to be in. This doesn’t happen very often, but we know it’s inconvenient for you. Again, we understand that we need to be better in managing expectations and we’re working closely with our contractors to make sure that appointments are kept, and also letting you know in plenty of time if we have to re-arrange.
Complaints
We work really hard to make sure our complaints process is as open and as accessible as possible. With so much demand on our repairs services and the challenges I've already mentioned, it's not surprising that we’ve seen an increase in the number of complaints we receive.
It’s great to see that, at the start of the complaints process, we’re responding to everyone on time, but because of how many complaints we’ve been handling, we’ve sometimes had to extend the time we take to make sure that we have been as thorough as possible with your complaint.
This has, in turn, meant that we’ve not hit our satisfaction score but compared to the last quarter, the score has increased by 13 per-cent. We’re making sure that the team are resourced to provide a great service and it’s great to see that the new members of our team are having a positive impact. We’re also prioritising faster replies to make sure you know what’s happening with your complaint.
Anti-social behaviour
Anti-social behaviour (ASB) can be an extremely disruptive and stressful problem to deal with, and it can often take a long time to find resolutions that support everyone involved.
It’s great to see that, during the last quarter, we’ve increased our satisfaction score by a brilliant 10 per-cent. Our teams that support customers with these issues have been working proactively to find customers that are experiencing these issues, targeting support to communities that are telling us about problems.
Our teams have been sending out surveys, listening to your feedback and using data to create sustainable solutions to ASB issues you tell us about, and we’re looking to push this further to make sure that this score keeps rising.
ASB can often involve working with multiple agencies such as the police and local authorities, so the networking and relationship building work that our teams have done is testament to the uplift in satisfaction we’ve seen.
We’re also really excited to be working with our Customer Scrutiny Panel over how we can better manage your expectations so we become great at saying what we do and doing what we say.
We’ll be back with more customer commitments soon.
Dave Lockerman, Director of Housing Operations
