Our Customer Commitments

As a responsible social landlord that believes what matters to our customers, matters to us, it’s really important to us that we’re open and transparent about our performance. The picture may not always be pretty, but we want you to know how we’re doing and how we’re using our performance information and your feedback to get better. 

One of the ways we do this is with our customer commitments. Our customer commitments are the service standards we’ve set with you. They look at things like our repairs performance, satisfaction with complaints, and how quickly we answer when you contact us. You can see our Customer Commitments here.  

Over the last three months, it’s been nice to see some smiley faces next to areas like complaint management and some solid performance on health and safety, but there still some areas where we know we need to improve. You can see our performance for the last quarter, as well as the previous reports on our website.  

If you’re like me, you find it frustrating when an organisation doesn’t get back to you and you’re kept waiting. We definitely don’t want to be that organisation so it’s not good enough that only 67% of our responses were on time.   

Over the last three months we’ve dealt with a massive 69,542 contacts from customers and while satisfaction is on target (85%) for our customer service centre, it’s when things are passed on from there to colleagues across the business that we’re seeing some issues.  

We’re a big organisation with colleagues spread throughout the country, so we need good systems in place to make sure customer contacts don’t ‘slip through the net’. We’re working on improving the visibility of customer contacts to all colleagues in the business, to prevent failures in communication and help us to understand any barriers so we can fix them. 

While satisfaction with the way we handle complaints is on its way up, we’re currently looking at how we can do things differently to try and resolve things more quickly if we can. We’ve also been doing more to make sure we’re learning from complaints, really reflecting on this feedback so we understand what’s gone wrong so we can stop it happening again in the future. 

It’s disappointing that we’ve seen a small reduction in satisfaction in responsive repairs, taking us to 2% under our target of 84%. Over the last three months we’ve carried out a whopping 35,632 repairs but just like all other businesses, we’ve been impacted by the pandemic and pressures on labour and materials, and this has meant that at times our contracting partners have struggled.  

We’re really sorry if you’ve experienced delays or the service hasn’t met your expectations.  Unfortunately, it’s not over yet but we’re working closely with our partners through this challenging time, aiming to drive up satisfaction and improve your experience. 

Its brilliant that a further 800 customers have joined the online ‘My Home’ portal over the last three months. This is great as you can access our services 24/7 as well as being able to access shopping discounts through our new MyRewards scheme. You’ve also told us in the recent Institute of Customer Services survey that you prefer online to any of our other channels as it’s easier for you. You can register for MyHome, and MyRewards at myhome.stonewater.org.  

Keeping customers safe and delivering quality services to you really matters to us. This latest performance shows some areas where we’re hitting our targets and others where we’re not there yet. We may not get better overnight but we promise we’ll keep using your feedback to get better. I look forward to sharing another update for the final three months of this financial year sometime in April. Watch this space. 

Kind regards,

David Lockerman, Customer Experience Director