Tenant Satisfaction Measure 10: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Great Places keeps communal areas clean, and well maintained?
The Great Places Grounds Maintenance Team is dedicated to keeping outdoor areas clean and well maintained for our customers. This includes tasks like cutting grass, trimming hedges and pruning. We work on shared spaces in schemes and developments across our regions that have communal landscaped areas.
About a year ago, we decided to bring most of the grounds maintenance service in-house. We have some areas where customers still receive a service delivered by a sub-contractor. Bringing much of the service inhouse was a significant undertaking, and while it has had its challenges, we have been striving to make improvements for smoother operations in the future.
We conducted a comprehensive review of the service, with crucial input from over 260 customers who shared their experience through our customer satisfaction survey earlier this year.
From their feedback, we learned that some customers were unclear about what the grounds maintenance service included, when, where and how it should happen, and who to contact if there were issues.
Based on customer feedback we looked at how we could improve the way we communicate what customers can expect from the service, general information about the offer and how to get in touch if customers have any issues.
To address this, we have taken steps to enhance communication and transparency:
The wider estates team is working hard on improving our caretaker offer to bring a wider skill set to the team, so that more communal repairs can be carried out by them. This is all with the key aim of providing a better service to our customers.
Work is also ongoing with our cleaning contracts. We are hoping to bring all externally procured cleaning to our communal areas to the same standard in the coming months, so that everyone benefits from the same great service. In addition to this, we are re-procuring our window cleaning contract which should be ready for 2024 to further improve our customer experience of the service.
This year’s grounds maintenance awareness campaign also saw us create a set of videos to help answer common questions about the service from customers.
You can view one of the videos here.
Plumlife is our award-winning affordable home ownership company and it’s been a busy and productive year for their Management Team, which manages many of our internal shared spaces including communal areas in some of our blocks. The team went through a restructure in April 2022, with a new delivery model that was designed to allow Property Managers to get out and about more to the properties that Plumlife manages.
We reviewed all the visit schedules for our properties to ensure that property managers visit all apartment blocks once a month and estates once a quarter as a minimum. This means that colleagues are more visible to customers and can spend more time building relationships and understanding what’s important to people and what is working well or not so well in each area.
We continue to listen to customers and ask for their thoughts on service improvements around things like the maintenance of shared green spaces, and we communicate maintenance schedules on noticeboards in shared areas so customers know what services to expect and when.
As part of our new structure, we also launched a new Plumlife-specific contact centre, called The Plumlife Directory, in April 2022, with the aim of being able to offer more resolutions to customers’ queries at the first point of contact.
This also frees up Property Managers to dedicate more time to scheme-specific issues, including the management of communal areas.
We launched a new Plumlife website in September 2022, with a dedicated residents’ area to help with frequently asked queries, then followed on with the new Plumlife customer portal in May. Customers were heavily involved in the design, functionality and user testing of both of these projects.
We have been working on the development of our asset management system over the last 12 months in order to refresh the data we hold at a scheme level. This is giving customers greater visibility on planned improvement works in their homes (see the Improving Customers’ Homes section for more on this).
There’s also been lots of work going on around energy assessments to look at ways we can help reduce electricity bills for customers, and this will continue to be an area of focus as we head towards the colder months.
