Learning from complaints – Q1 2023-24

When you make a complaint, it’s really important that as well as doing what we can to put things right for you, we make sure we find out what went wrong and that we tell you what we’ve learned from them.
Thanks to the information and insight you give us during a complaint, we’re able to make real changes across our business to help us improve.
Here’s what we’ve learned from your complaints in the last three months.
You can see our last learning from complaints update just here
Complaint handling
In our last update, we told you that our team is dealing with higher volumes of complaints at the moment, placing extra demand on our service and slowing down our response rates.
We understand the frustration this is causing, and we’ve made some changes that are aimed at speeding up responses for you. This includes recruiting new team members, and putting in place better systems so we can follow up on our commitments faster.
Our team is working hard to catch up on our responses and to make sure you receive the best possible customer service when you get in touch. It’ll take a few more weeks for our new colleagues to learn the ropes fully but we’ve already caught up on our case raising.
To make sure we keep improving, managers in our team are going to call customers each week to ask for your feedback. This will start in September, and we’ll let you know what changes we make based on your feedback.
We’ve also introduced a new system that makes it easier for us to track progress against the commitments we make in our complaint responses. This will mean we complete our actions faster and communicate with you better if there are any delays. This will be especially useful in critical areas such as repairs.
You also told us that sometimes it takes too long for us to escalate your complaints to stage two and, following a review of our processes, we’re implementing recommendations to speed this up. We’ll update you in October about the changes we’re making and what that means for our customers.
Take a look below at some of our new team members taking part in some training:



Reasonable adjustments
We want our customers to feel safe, secure and comfortable in their homes, and sometimes this means that adjustments need to be made to make things a little easier for you.
We have had some complaints that have told us that this is an area we can do better with, and we’re taking a closer look at how we handle these requests. Our surveyors, complaints team and other key staff members are undertaking new training to help them understand how they can support customers who are asking for help.
So far, we’ve held two sessions and colleagues have shared that it’s helped them to understand how they can tweak what they do to deliver better and more personalised services.
We’re also doing a review of all the complaints we’ve had in this area to see what we can do to stop these from happening and improve the service.
Success stories
As well as learning about how we can improve, it’s important that we share examples of what a good service looks like so they know what we expect of them.
Recent cases involving successful resolutions for issues like anti-social behaviour are being shared across our business to help others understand what to do in these situations. Our Scrutiny Panel is also reviewing how we manage anti-social behaviour, and we’ll be in touch soon to share the changes we’re making to our services.
Information sharing
Having the right information to hand is crucial in helping us to handle your complaint in a timely and accurate way. To make sure that our colleagues understand the importance of recording the information you give us, we’re planning a company-wide communications campaign. This will start in September, and we’ll be training our colleagues throughout the autumn.
The examples you have given us will make sure that this campaign hits home for our colleagues, and improve our record keeping to make sure that whoever you talk to at Stonewater, we understand the issue you’re having.
[…] Here’s a look at what we’ve learned from your complaints in the last few months, and if you’d like to remind yourself of our last update, you can see that here. […]