Customer Feedback and Service Improvements
Your feedback is vital to us. Having received almost 124,000 customer contacts over the past 12 months (January to December 2023), your comments about your experiences - whether it’s through a survey, a complaint or other contact - are regularly used to understand how our services are performing, and to make improvements to the services we offer.
Some of the feedback we receive may be recorded as dissatisfied contacts or as formal complaints:
- A dissatisfied contact is usually a minor issue you have raised, which requires action to be taken including putting things right.
- A formal complaint is where you have raised a more serious issue, or where you contacted us about something you were dissatisfied with, which you feel is still unresolved after we have had an opportunity to deal with it.
Learning from Complaints:
The feedback we receive from customers through their complaints is invaluable. By reviewing the learning points from complaints you have made, we are able to make changes because of your feedback.
Below are some specific examples of where we have listened to your feedback over recent months and have put plans in place to improve our services.
Complaints and DissatisfiedContacts 2023/24 Quarter 3: October to December 2023
Complaint Stage 1 (new cases):
During the three months to December, there were 65 new Stage 1 complaints. In October and November, there were 24 and 27 cases respectively, the highest monthly levels seen so far this year. Whilst there were 10 more cases in Quarter 3 (Q3) compared to Q2, the proportion of new cases by business area was different in each quarter. During Q3, repairs and housing complaints accounted for 60% of cases (39 of the 65), whereas in Q2 they comprised 75% (41 out of 55 cases), which is a more typical make up of complaints.
Three business areas accounted more of the Stage 1 complaints in the most recent quarter compared with Q2: programmed works (12%), rent - mainly former tenant cases (9%) and development (6% of cases in Q3). This largely makes up the difference from the lower proportion of repairs and housing cases in Q3.
We are anticipating that the total number of cases at the year-end will comfortably exceed 200, and will be at least 50% higher than in 2022/23, when there were 137 new cases. Currently, we are receiving an average of 18 new complaints each month, compared to 11-12 throughout last year
Complaint Stage 2 (complaint appeals):
Customers are prepared to pursue complaints covering a broad range of business areas. During Q3 2023/24, 15 cases escalated to appeal (Stage 2): five were about repairs, three were programmed works cases, two development, and one case each was related to housing, rent, grounds maintenance, data protection and complaint handling respectively. This is almost double the number of Stage 2 cases in the previous quarter (eight).
Around 15% of cases have gone to appeal this year to date (25 out of 162 new Stage 1 cases). A similar proportion (17%) had gone to appeal by the end of Q3 2022/23 (14 out of 83 cases).
Housing Ombudsman cases:
We are finding that customers are increasingly prepared raise complaints directly with the Housing Ombudsman (HO). In such instances, the HO Service will contact us and we are then required to log and track the case through our usual two-stage process.
If a customer has exhausted our complaints process and we have provided a final response which they are not satisfied with, they can decide whether to take their complaint to the Housing Ombudsman. We must then provide a copy of our response to the HO Service for further investigation and their adjudication.
To date in 2023/24, only two cases have been taken to the HO following a final Stage 2 decision.
Dissatisfied Contacts:
There were 12% fewer dissatisfied contacts in the three months from October to December than in the prior three months (268 versus 305 in Q2). Conversely, there were slightly more formal complaints in Q3 (65 versus 55 in Q2). This may indicate that our customers are presenting more significant issues, which need to be dealt with as a formal complaint rather than as a contact in the first instance.
The split of contacts by business area in Q3 was similar to Q2. Repairs, Housing and Programmed Works accounted for more than 4 in 5 dissatisfied contacts (83% in Q3 versus 85% in Q2). Of the remainder, rent and service charges comprised a greater proportion of contacts in Q3 (7% versus 3% in Q2); and not surprisingly, given the seasonal work, grounds maintenance comprised a smaller proportion of contacts in Q3 (2% versus 5% in Q2).
