Tenant Satisfaction Measure 02: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the overall repairs service from Great Places over the last 12 months?
Tenant Satisfaction Measure 03: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the time taken to complete your most recent repair after you reported it?
Our Repairs Team make sure our customers’ homes are safe and well maintained. They handle routine fixes and are on hand to respond to emergencies as they happen.
We understand that how fast and well we fix things is important to our customers. In a survey we did in February 2022-23, we found that 71% of the customers we asked were either very satisfied or fairly satisfied with our service. But that also means that sometimes we do not get things right first time and we need to keep improving.
We completed over 57,000 jobs this year which included 9,451 emergency repairs which we respond to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
In a survey where we asked how satisfied customers were with our repairs service, we got a score of 8 out of 10. People told us they liked how our skilled team was focused on customers. At the time of publishing this report we also have an average score of 4.7 out of 5 on independent review platform Trustpilot, and the majority of our positive reviews are related to our repairs service.
Customers give our repairs operatives positive feedback regularly. Hear about what our customers say in this short video.
Nicola says: “Ian and Eddie arrived to do my repair. Both gentlemen were very professional, polite and considerate in my home. They carried out their work to an amazing standard and left my property clean and tidy. Very impressed by the workmanship and customer service.”
Just like other housing providers, we have faced a lot of challenges during 2022-2023 because of an unpredictable environment. We will continue to work with and learn from our customers to keep getting better and do everything we can to improve our services.
We usually complete more than 80% of our repairs during the first visit, but in the last year, some customers were unhappy about how long it took for trickier fixes to be carried out or where follow-up visits were required.
Last autumn, we had a huge increase in requests for property checks following our campaign for customers to report issues like condensation, damp and mould. This meant we had an increase of over 500% demand for property inspections and related works, which put a huge amount of pressure on our service.
In addition, there were also challenges of finding and keeping skilled team members with the current job market to make sure that we can deliver services with the increased level of demand.
We have listened to our customers and have hired more Property Service Managers to manage complex repairs and improve communication with customers.
We also brought in more support staff to help customers, especially with things like condensation, damp, and mould.
Our award-winning apprenticeship programme is still going strong. We are training more people to make sure we have enough skills for the future.
We continue to listen to what our customers need and prepare for the inevitable increase in demand for our services as winter approaches. We have shared our new Customer Commitments, so everyone knows what we are aiming for with routine and emergency fixes. And we are doing better at identifying and responding to reports of condensation, damp, and mould. If customers tell us about these issues, we aim to carry out the initial investigation of these reports within 10 working days.
Despite many successes it was a challenging year for us with a record number of complaints received. We received 525 complaints on repairs in 2022/23. We also had to respond to a considerable number of damp and mould cases that were reported to us.
We also introduced new software to manage our customer records, tenancies and property management as well as a new system to book repairs. We expect these to make improvements in the future but as often happens with the introduction of new software, we experienced some challenges in the initial stages that impacted our service offer.
We also faced a challenging and competitive labour market making it difficult for us to recruit to some key roles in our contact centre and repairs operative. We have improved our offer for new and existing colleagues in a number of roles to help us attract new colleagues as well as retain existing ones. As a result we are starting to see improvements to call waiting times in the contact centre and a reduction in colleagues leaving the business.
