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Theme 1: Great for customers

What we want to achieve

A consistently great service offer for customers that’s easy for everyone to use.

This means we’ll be delivering brilliant basics every day. We’ll work to align our processes, technology and culture to make sure that they’re underpinned by customer data and insight about how customers interact with us.

We know this will never be a finished job as the needs of our customers will keep evolving and we’ll have to keep pace.

We’ll only get this right by designing our services in collaboration with users and with the colleagues that deliver.

By engaging widely, not only will our customers know what to expect from us and feel confident that we’ll meet their expectations, we’ll also improve cost effectiveness by getting things right first time more often.

Whether our customers are tenants or owner-occupiers, are people who need support or who don’t, wherever they live, this has to be our goal.

What we’ll do

Work with customers to design better services

Work with customers to design better services
Using their feedback and insight, we’ll learn from where we get things wrong and collaborate directly with our involved customers. We’ll focus on getting the basics right.

Personalise delivery to meet the differing needs of our diverse customers

Personalise delivery to meet the differing needs of our diverse customers
We’ll make sure we hold the right information about customers so that our colleagues can tailor how they work with individuals and are able to offer additional support where it’s needed.

Provide a variety of ways to access our service options

Provide a variety of ways to access our service options
These range from person-to-person delivery through to a 24/7 digital offer.

We’ll work with customers to make sure our digital offerings are consistently easy to use. In doing this we won’t abandon the digitally excluded, who we know form a significant minority of customers.

We’ll also measure how easy it is to do business with us so we can continually adapt and improve.

Make use of technology to support effective service delivery

Make use of technology to support effective service delivery
This means working to improve the options for customers, providing better tools to our colleagues to support them to be more effective and using technology to identify where we might offer support to pre-empt a problem before it happens.

Be really clear about what we can provide, where we’re able help and support and where we’re not best placed to do this

Be really clear about what we can provide, where we’re able help and support and where we’re not best placed to do this
We’ll hold our partners to account to ensure they are meeting their responsibilities towards our customers.

Build relationships with customers based on mutual respect

Build relationships with customers based on mutual respect
We’ll provide our customers with a clean, safe and well-maintained home with accessible, tailored and responsive services.

In return we ask that customers take responsibility to manage their tenancy well, with support when needed, by paying their rent, looking after their home and respecting their neighbours, community and our colleagues.

Embed a customer-centric attitude and approach across all our teams so we deliver with empathy

Embed a customer-centric attitude and approach across all our teams so we deliver with empathy
It’s important that customers can trust us to deliver what we say we’ll deliver. We know that sometimes our services fall down as a result of poor communication, either internally or with our partners.

We’ll work on our culture to ensure a focus on working effectively together to do the right thing for customers, with good two-way communication at the heart of this.

Take a data-driven approach

Take a data-driven approach
We’ll make sure that we hold good quality and up to date information about our customers and how they contact us.

Alongside the knowledge and experience of our colleagues, good data will ensure we make good decisions and help us to shape and improve our offer.

Offer value-added services that can be accessed, where needed, to support customers to live well in their homes

Offer value-added services that can be accessed, where needed, to support customers to live well in their homes
Sometimes we’ll provide these directly and sometimes we’ll work closely with partners that are better placed to deliver what customers need.

Focus most on what customers want and need

Focus most on what customers want and need
We’ll work on improving the consistency of our delivery and pre-empting problems where possible. By doing this we’ll be able to improve our efficiency and offer better value for money.

Learn from the best in the housing sector and other service sectors

Learn from the best in the housing sector and other service sectors
We’ll use what we learn to continually develop our offer and ensure it keeps pace with customer expectations.

How we’ll do it

over the life of this plan we’ll

  • Assess the effectiveness of our repairs, maintenance and investment offer in conjunction with customers and colleagues. We’ll reiterate our approach to ensure effective collaboration between teams and with partner contractors, meaning we deliver value for money and quality for our customers.
  • Invest in technology that enables colleagues to do a great job, provides easy access to support for customers and allows us to make better use of data to deliver more proactive services that pre-empt potential issues before they arise.
  • Improve how we collect and manage customer data and insight to enable us to understand our customers better.
  • Review the effectiveness of our customer, housing and neighbourhood management and support services in meeting the changing needs of all our customers as well as our changing property profile. We’ll re-design our delivery in collaboration with colleagues and customers and adapt our operating model to ensure we are set up for success.
  • Review our approach to how we allocate and let our homes to ensure we meet the needs of our customers and create places that will be sustainable into the future.
  • Make sure our services deliver value to our customers and to Great Places so we can continue to reinvest in our homes and communities through our profit for purpose model.

How we’ll measure success

The outcomes we will monitor are:

  • Overall customer satisfaction (Tenant Satisfaction Measure, or TSM)
  • Customer satisfaction with repairs (TSM)
  • Customer satisfaction with ASB (TSM)
  • Customer satisfaction with complaints (TSM)
  • Our ease of doing business score (our internal Signal For Success (SFS) score)
  • % tenancies sustained for at least 12 months as a result of supportive intervention

Some key drivers of these outcomes that we will also monitor are:

  • % repairs right first time
  • % emergency repairs completed within timescale (TSM Management Measure)
  • % ASB cases triaged within timescale
  • % ASB cases meeting audit quality standards
  • % complaints responded to on time (TSM Management Measure)
  • % customers satisfied their service request was dealt with right first time