Providing a high-quality service to our customers is essential. When we know our customers are satisfied, we can be confident that we’re delivering the right services for them. To make sure we’re on the right track we regularly review our performance and utilise the voice of our customers to steer our services.
In the past year the pandemic has clearly had an impact on our customer satisfaction results. The health, safety and wellbeing of our customers and colleagues has always come first. So we had to temporarily suspend some services and change the way we work during the start of the pandemic. Where possible, we moved appointments and visits to phone and video, but as anticipated, customer satisfaction results saw some impact because of this.
We continued to carry out critical repairs and then brought the rest of our services – such as grounds maintenance and planned works – back in stages as we eased out of lockdown. As always, we use insight from our customers to better what we do, to ensure we’re delivering the best we can for everyone.
As we started to provide more services, our satisfaction increased. This reached 81.2% satisfaction (for rental customers) in February 2021 before dipping to 79.9% in March. This dip is likely due to the issuing of rent and service charge statements for the coming year. Some customers will have received an increase in rent due to the Rent Standard. Our colleagues work hard to support our customers and during the 2020/21 year 85.4% of customer queries were resolved at the first point of contact.
Leasehold and Market Rent
Our year-end arrears figure was 1.3% for leasehold properties (excluding Solent, as Solent area arrears are excluded as the year term does not run March to April). This was an exceptional performance in a year where many customers were in financial crisis or faced uncertainty. We worked collaboratively with our customers to offer support, arranging payment plans to suit our customers’ needs, and offering welfare and benefit support services to ensure income was maximised.
An additional income of £135k was brought into the business through lease extensions and other services through 366 transactions. 18 of these were lease extensions where customers extended their lease term by a further 90 years. 145 were through landlord enquiry for customers selling their properties as the first lockdown lifted.
Scrutiny of our service charges ensured that an additional £100k was added and recovered to service charge accounts. The leasehold team review the costs and reasonableness of charges for communal repairs and major works programme on a quarterly basis. This ensures that costs are charged in line with the lease covenants and, where appropriate, statutory consultation processes have been followed. The scrutiny exercise also reviews repairs that have not been identified as service chargeable in error. The additional £100K is the sum of works, the costs of which would not have been recovered without this scrutiny.
In a year of limited house moves in the sector, we let 165 market rent properties during the year. During lockdown, moving home was restricted, so we had a limited window between lockdowns to process requests from customers to give notice, complete void works needed and arrange for viewings and lets.
Voice of our customers
Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. We give customers the opportunity to have their say, whether it’s a complaint or feedback on a recent service, or ideas on ways we can improve.
To deliver great customer service and prioritise the voice of our customers we’ve introduced the Customer Service and Performance Committee, made up of members of our Executive Board and Group Board. It looks further into customer satisfaction through analysis, discussion and debate to approve new projects to benefit our customers and communities.
We’ve also introduced a customer charter. Developed in consultation with our customers, it sets out what services they can expect from us. And it’s our commitment to them that we’re listening to what they say, valuing their feedback and using it to improve our services.
You said, we did
A lot of what we do is in direct response to what our customers tell us they would benefit from. This is about being proactive in prioritising the needs of our customers and then responding with appropriate action. Here’s a few examples of that:
- Our customers said they were concerned about anti-social behaviour in local parks and open spaces in Gosport. So we worked with Hampshire Constabulary and Mutual Gain to host World Café, part of a national campaign to help tackle serious youth crime.
- Our customers said they wanted the Longwood Park Tots group to continue virtually during Covid-19 restrictions. So, we helped the group setup a WhatsApp for families and provided craft ideas for families to do.
- Our customers said they couldn’t report certain repairs on the portal. So we’ve added more types of repairs to the portal for them to report.
