Tenant Satisfaction Measure 09: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with Great Places’ approach to complaints handling?
At Great Places, we are committed to delivering excellent services to our customers and communities. However, we understand that there might be times when we don’t meet the high standards that are expected. That’s where customer feedback comes in – it’s a vital tool that helps us understand what’s working well and where we can improve.
Our dedicated Customer Feedback Team has developed a strong process for handling complaints. We learn from both complaints and compliments, so we can share best practices with our people and across our services. Over the past year, we have been actively listening to our customers, making improvements based on their feedback, experiences and suggestions.
We believe in accountability and transparency. That is why we openly share data about our complaints in various places like our customer magazines, digital bulletins, and our website. In 2022-23, we encountered some challenges, particularly an increase in complaints due to pressures on our repairs service. However, we are working tirelessly to address these challenges and make things right for our customers, including hiring more people to carry out repairs sooner.
In the period from April 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023, we received a total of 921 complaints, covering both Stage One and Stage Two complaints. This represents a significant increase compared to the previous year’s figure of 434 complaints.
In 2022-2023, the top five areas customers told us they were most unhappy with are:
Most complaints (96.3%) were resolved at the first stage of our complaints process, with only 41 (3.7%) needing to be escalated to Stage Two.
We have been actively listening to feedback from customers about our Complaints Service.
Customers told us that it was important that we responded quickly to reports of damp, mould and condensation.
We have made a commitment to customers to ensure we respond in a timely manner to reports of damp, mould and condensation. We have communicated this with customers across a number of communication channels and have a dedicated page on our website:
Our customer service offer states:
Great Places’ Property Condition project team monitors and tracks damp, mould and condensation cases to ensure cases identified are resolved in line with our commitments.
Customers told us that we don’t always communicate well, especially when repairs appointments need to be rescheduled or cancelled.
Great Places wants to ensure that we keep customers updated about things that affect them and, following feedback received about how we communicate with our customers, we launched our colleague ‘Great Conversations’ campaign in early 2023. As a business, we want to be present, purposeful and powerful in our conversations. Great Conversations is all about creating a culture of trust, connection, and open conversations with everyone we do business with.
We also launched a new quarterly customer z-card to ensure we consistently communicate the services and support Great Places offers, as well any processes and key information that we need customers to know about (see the Customer Communications section for more).
Customers told us that we need to ensure we are offering an efficient, fair and timely Customer Feedback service.
The Customer Feedback Team has made a number of improvements in the way it delivers our services to ensure we are investigating and resolving complaints in a fair and proportionate way.
We have made sure that there is a focus on accessibility and we have designed a new animation to accompany the Customer Feedback Policy on the website. The Customer Feedback team has attended numerous training programmes to support customers, including neurodiversity training and trans awareness.
In addition, we have designed an internal training programme to ensure colleagues understand the complaints handling processes, best practice and the regulatory requirements around complaints handling that we must all comply with.
We are committed to making it as simple as possible for customers to share their feedback with us.
There are lots of examples throughout the other pages of this report that highlight the improvements we are making in services – this is often in response to feedback and complaints e.g. repairs improvements, ASB policy and Grounds Maintenance improvements.
In addition to the steps mentioned above, we have introduced a several enhancements in 2022-23 to streamline the process of providing feedback, including the creation of a new animation to guide customers through the process.
We have created an animation that you can watch here, which walks you through the steps of providing feedback and reporting complaints. This animation is designed to make it easy for you to understand the process and stages involved. It is part of our effort to assist you in accessing the Customer Feedback policy by offering clear and concise information.
Additionally, we have established a new Customer Feedback Community. This group of customers will play a vital role in helping us gauge our performance against the standards set by the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman Complaints Handling Code. Their insights and feedback will guide us in making continuous improvements to our services.
