Tenant Satisfaction Measure 01: Taking everything into account, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the service provided by Great Places?
At Great Places, our goal is to provide great homes and services for the people in our communities with the aim of making a positive difference to their lives.
We provide a wide range of services to support our diverse customers and community groups. We provide many different kinds of homes – most for rent, some to buy (including shared ownership and outright sale) and even homes for important NHS workers to live in. We also have independence and wellbeing schemes that help people who need extra support. Other arms to our organisation include Plumlife, our award-winning affordable home ownership company; Cube, which develops quality new homes for market sale and private rent; and Terra Nova, our in-house construction company.
For us, it’s not just about the buildings. We care about values and making a positive difference. To deliver our wide range of different services we work in partnership with other organisations to create great communities that people are proud to live in.
We value the feedback and input of our customers to help us make improvements. By telling us what they think, customers living in our homes help us change things that aren’t working and to make their experiences better.
We ask our customers how satisfied they are with Great Places as well as what is going well. We also want to know what might not be going perfectly and work with customers to fix and improve our offerings. This year has been challenging for us and for our customers because of the cost of living crisis, responding to condensation, damp and mould cases; and an increase in cases of mental health.
We keep track of how satisfied our customers are every few months and have changed how we measure how well you think we are doing. Instead of using something called the UK Customer Satisfaction Index, we now follow the way the Regulator of Social Housing (sometimes referred to as the Regulator) measures satisfaction. This new way of measuring satisfaction will be mandatory starting in 2023-24 so we have started early.
For 2022-23, we aimed for 70% satisfaction based on how we have done before and how similar organisations are doing. Our 2022-23 overall satisfaction score was 69%.
We also look at 11 other measures, like whether customers are satisfied with our repair service and if they feel like they are treated fairly and with respect. All these measures are part of what we now report to the Regulator, and share with our customers every year.
We have been putting in a lot of effort to address areas where customers tell us they are not satisfied, and we take their feedback seriously and try to make things better.
We always want to be open and honest about where we have fallen short. That is why we share information about the complaints we get in our magazines, online updates, and on our website. We have made it easy for customers to tell us what they think through our new digital platform called Our Voice (see the Customer Involvement section). We also gather feedback after we send out our eNews bulletins and customer magazines (find more in the Customer Communications section).
At Great Places, making regular improvements is a key priority for us. We have recently reviewed and improved our approach to getting feedback from customers and we compare what we learn at local, regional and national levels.
We try to involve customers whenever we can. We gather their opinions and work together to create services and an experience that meets their needs.
You will find more about how we listen to customers and support them in different parts of this report. Section 2, for example, focuses on our repairs service.
When it comes to achieving high levels of satisfaction, we understand that customers need clear information about the services we provide. We have just launched our Customer Commitments, and these set out when and how we will respond to enquiries.
These commitments spell out exactly what customers can expect from us as their landlord. This includes things like:
This information can now be found all together in one place on our website. We make it easy and clear for customers to understand what they can expect from the services we provide.
If you want to know more, head over to the Performance Information for Customers page on our website or watch the video.
