How we performed last year (2022-23)

Satisfaction with experience contacting our customer experience team

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We want to improve the call wait times, so you can get through to us when you need to. We’re pleased that when you do get through, the feedback about the help and support that is given by our advisors is really positive. That’s why we’re focusing on bringing in more advisors to be able to respond to you more quickly. 

We also know you want to get your issues resolved at the first point of contact, without being passed around, so we’re increasing the skills and knowledge of our contact centre staff to solve more of your queries there and then. An example of this is the introduction of our new technical specialists over the next year, who’ll be able to help you with any online queries that you may have. 

Satisfaction with ease of contacting us

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We’re focused on reducing the wait time when you contact us. We know that our wait times are too long and we’re recruiting more contact centre advisors to help us respond to you faster. We’re also working on new and improved ways for you to contact us, including a new customer online account and chatbot, which will provide you with a better service than we currently offer. 

Satisfaction with how easy we are to deal with

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Last year, we received 19,270 scores where customers rated us 10/10 after an interaction with us, but we know we can improve. From the feedback we receive from customers we know how important it is for us to do what we say, when we say we’ll do it. Our teams are monitored to make their call backs within the target timescales and to keep you updated on the queries you’ve raised with us.  We know we need to do this consistently as you tell us that we often don’t keep our promises, and this is a key focus for all our teams this year.  

Satisfaction with repairs

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It’s important that any repairs or improvements are made quickly and with little disruption to your lives and this year alone, 112,309 responsive repairs were completed. We know we need to reduce wait times in our repairs service and to do this we’ve recruited an additional 20 trades staff.  We’ve also created an escalation team to deal with emergencies, complex cases and sickness within the main repairs team. This’ll reduce the number of jobs cancelled due to sickness. And finally new roles have been created to allow us to better manage materials, so we’ll know before the day of the appointment if the parts haven’t arrived. This is often because, like many businesses across the country, over the past year we’ve faced challenges in supply of certain materials and parts to enable us to complete repairs due to national shortages.

This year, we invested £82.1 million in improving, repairing and maintaining our homes and we made improvements to our services that matter most to you. 

Emergency repairs completed within 24 hours

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On average last year, we managed to complete emergency repairs within 7.5 hours, but we want to go further! So, we’ve created an escalation team to deal with emergencies, complex cases and sickness within our main repairs team. We hope this will ensure we get to all emergencies within target. 

Repair appointments kept by us

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To improve the number of appointments kept by us, we’ve created an escalation team to deal with emergencies, complex cases and sickness within the main repairs team. This’ll reduce the number of jobs cancelled due to sickness. We’ve also created planner administrator roles to help manage materials on order, helping us know before the day of your appointment that the parts haven’t arrived yet. This is often because, like many businesses across the country, over the past year we’ve faced challenges in supply of certain materials and parts to enable us to complete repairs due to national shortages.

Satisfaction with the handling of complaints

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Everyone wants and expects great customer service, and while we may not always get it right, we are striving to deliver the best we can. We’ve continued to comply with The Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) complaint handling code, published in July 2020, to ensure when we haven’t met your expectations, we’re responding to your complaint effectively and fairly. 

Our Customer Resolution team constantly evaluate our complaints process, and ultimately ensure that the service we provide meets our published service standards.

To improve our complaint handling service over the year ahead, we’re creating a dedicated, centralised team to manage complaint cases and work with colleagues to provide the best possible outcome against our published standards and procedures. We hope you don’t need to raise concerns, but when we don’t get it right, you’ll have a main point of contact to support you to get things fixed. We’ll be monitoring how things improve over the coming months.

We review our complaint processes each year to ensure we meet the requirements of the Housing Ombudsman’s Scheme and accompanying code.  The code sets out good practice that allows us and other landlords to respond to complaints effectively and fairly. This includes how we use learning from complaints to drive service improvements. We’ve carried out a self-assessment against the Code which you can view here. This shows how we comply against the requirements, along with actions for areas where we know we need to improve. 

Number of complaints handled per 1,000 homes

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We encourage customers to tell us when we don’t get things right. The level of complaints is something we monitor so we can pick up on trends to enable us to make improvements quickly.  

Complaints resolved with agreed timescales

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Resolving complaints within our timescales is something we monitor. To help us to improve our timescales, we’ve changed the way we handle complaints.  We’re creating a dedicated, centralised team to manage complaint cases and work with colleagues to provide the best possible outcome against our published standards and procedures. We hope you don’t need to raise concerns, but when we don’t get it right, you’ll have a main point of contact to support you to get things fixed. We’ll be monitoring how things improve over the coming months.

Satisfaction with the way we handled your anti-social behaviour case

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To improve the way we handle anti-social behaviour cases, we’ve listened to your feedback and we’ve created a dedicated anti-social behaviour team, who’ll manage all cases of ASB. This will enable us to provide a consistent and focused response to issues that are raised. We’re monitoring the success of the team and hope to see satisfaction with the service improve.  

Satisfaction with our contribution to your neighbourhood

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We know that our broader neighbourhood plays an important role in our lives, so we’ve kickstarted an investment programme into a number of our estates. We’ll be working closely and consulting with customers and the wider community on the improvements, which we hope will make a big difference to these estates. 

We’re encouraging our neighbourhood officers to be visible in our communities and over the past year, they’ve completed 10,000 estate inspections and 20,000 face-to-face visits. This proactive approach to managing our neighbourhoods allows our officers to really know the communities in which they work and help to solve the issues affecting these areas and build better relationships with the customers on their patch.  

We hope you’ll see further improvement in this area over the year ahead, as we’ve recently implemented changes to our neighbourhood services. We’re increasing the staff in our Anti-social behaviour (ASB) team, so they can give you the right level of support and they’ll now manage all ASB cases. We’re also introducing a Service Charge and Leasehold team, who’ll be able to provide specialist advice and focus on our shared owners and leaseholder queries. This will free up our Neighbourhoods team to be able to focus on tenancy and estate management. 

Our performance compared to other housing associations: 

• Our performance: 62.4% 
• Other housing associations performance: 59.6% 

Satisfaction with the way we keep communal areas clean

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We know you want to be proud of the block you live in, and we’re pleased that satisfaction with keeping communal areas clean is above target and we’re performing better than other housing associations in this area. To ensure we keep communal areas in good condition, we’re also starting to give our caretakers tools so they can carry out small repairs in the blocks they work in to get things fixed quicker.  

Our performance compared to other housing associations: 

• Our performance: 75.2% 
• Other housing associations performance: 62.1% 

Satisfaction that your home is well-maintained

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This year, we invested £82.1 million in improving, repairing and maintaining our homes and completed 4,651 planned maintenance improvements (such as kitchen and bathroom replacements). This included 1,769 new heating systems, 6,829 new windows, 2,291 new doors, 383 new bathrooms, 220 new roofs and 697 new kitchens. 

We’re working hard to better understand the condition of your homes through our five-yearly home condition surveys and planning investment into these to make sure they remain well maintained. We’re listening to your feedback, to identify areas of priority and we’re adjusting our plans accordingly. 

A key focus as part of this, is working towards improving the energy efficiency of our homes to help make sure you have manageable living costs. And we’re delighted to have secured £4.6m of government funding to improve the energy efficiency of around 400 of homes in North Hampshire. 

Satisfaction with our planned maintenance service

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Last year we provided 1,769 new heating systems, 6,829 new windows, 2,291 new doors, 383 new bathrooms, 220 new roofs and 697 new kitchens. 

We know that keeping customers better informed on their planned improvement is important and we’re working closely with our contractors to improve this and taking on board feedback received from customers as part of this. 

To improve the quality of what we deliver, we're introducing better controls to ensure that works are of the standard we expect first time and that customers are delighted with what we have delivered. 

Compliance with our safety obligations

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This year, we carried out over 48,000 safety compliance visits and provided 24,346 properties with gas certificates. We’re pleased to have achieved a 100% safety rating. 

Satisfaction that your home is safe and secure

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We’re continuing to ensure all safety checks are completed on time and introducing some enhanced fire standards as part of new fire legislation. This includes the following measures in our buildings over 18 metres tall: quarterly communal fire door checks, new Gerda boxes which contain all the information the fire service would need in the event of a fire, as well as new wayfinding signage to support evacuations.  

We’re also prioritising communal repairs, like door entry, to help customers feel safe and secure in their homes. 

Our performance compared to other housing associations: 

• Our performance: 77.1% 
• Other housing associations performance: 76% 

Satisfaction with the way we listen to your views and take notice

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We have 1,250 involved customers and are about to start another recruitment process with the aim of getting this figure above 1,500. 

Our customers’ views matter to us, as together we can improve the way we design and deliver good quality homes and services. They have the opportunity to get involved, have a voice, shape and influence what we do. There are a variety of ways a customer can get involved, based around interests, preferences and the time available to give.  

We have a diverse group of over 1,250 involved customers who have their say on our services and who’ve provided valuable insight over the past year, including: 

• Our 61 Neighbourhood Volunteers who’ve helped keep their areas safe by completing regular estate inspections and report repairs or problems in communal areas.  

• Resident groups - we work with 17 resident groups to make a difference in their local area.

• Our VIVID Plus Board which is made up of 2 customers, 1 board member and staff. They’re shaping our community investment activities and overseeing our tenancy support services. 

• VIVID Impact is our customer-led scrutiny group. They carry out independent inspections of our services and report their findings to the Customer Service Committee. This year, this included helping to shape and define our new service standards that set out the service that you should expect from us. 

• The Customer Service Committee is a sub-committee of the VIVID Board, made up of 3 customers, staff and board members. The committee shapes our service standards and oversees our performance. 

• Our 1,280 customers have been involved in our consultations, where they have the chance to review, feedback and improve our services. Some of the things that these customers have reviewed over the past year, include the review of various policies, as well as the designs of our new customer online account. 

The value of benefits and grants we assisted customers to claim

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With the cost of living crisis affecting lots of our customers, we increased resource into our money advice and benefits team to support our customers who were struggling, which paid off as the team beat the target. As well as this, the team also allocated £310k of our welfare fund to customers in need and helped clear £419k of customers debt. 

You can read about how the Money Advice and Benefits team supported one of our customers with their debt worries, and helped them to claim £18k in unclaimed benefits here. 

Number of customers supported by the tenancy support team

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We’ve continued to help our customers and communities with VIVID Plus delivering real impact. We’ve invested over £250,000 in place shaping projects, aimed at helping customers with the cost of living crisis, bringing our community centres back into use through social enterprise and developing local plans for our communities most in need of support. 

Number of customers supported back into work

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448 customers were supported by our employment and training team gaining 288 job starts. In the early part of the financial year, we received fewer referrals than expected which was partly reflective of the overall jobs market but following a campaign to remind internal colleagues of our services, referrals and job starts improved at the later end of the year. The team also helped 194 customers to be able to use a digital device or access to the internet. 

Shared ownership overall satisfaction

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We’ve listened to your feedback on how you’d like our neighbourhood services to be delivered, and we’ve made some changes, which we hope will allow us to deliver a better customer experience for our leasehold and shared owner customers. 

We’re introducing a new Service Charge and Leasehold team, who’ll be able to provide specialist advice and focus on your queries, which we hope will increase your satisfaction in our service.

Satisfaction with the service provided when moving into your new home

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We’re proud of the service we deliver in helping customers move into their new homes and below we’ve shared some of the feedback we received from customers over the past year:

• "We received excellent communication and support from the first stage through to exchange of contracts. The staff were very friendly and quick to respond to my emails and calls."
• "We were kept updated and informed all the way through the process with the purchase of our new home. Any queries we had or problems we've had so far were dealt with quickly and swiftly. Your Sales team were excellent to deal with."
• "Everyone was very helpful and very informative, they also helped us to move in as quickly as possible and the move was hassle free."

Satisfaction with the service provided when moving into your new home

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We let 1,890 homes over the past year and our new customers are telling us that they are satisfied with the help and support they’ve experienced when moving into their home. We use any feedback to make changes and improve the service. 

Overall customer satisfaction

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We’re implementing a business-wide transformation programme, which will change the way we work, investing in technology and our people to make it easier to contact us. We’re developing a new customer online account, which will allow you to access more of our services 24/7, as well as other new, online services to make it easier to find the answer to your queries. We hope that you’ll see a real step change in service and customer experience as we implement these changes over the coming months and years.  

We’re also investing heavily in responding to repairs and making it easier for you to contact us, as we know from feedback that these are the two most important services to customers. When you do contact us, and we resolve the issue you rate us 8.6/10, and we’re pleased that 19,270 customers rated us 10/10 after an interaction. However, you also told us we take too long to answer the phone and repairs take too long. So, we’ve invested more money in these services by employing more customer experience advisors and trade operatives to make improvements in these areas. We hope you’ll start to see a difference as we progress through the summer months. 

Our performance compared to other housing associations: 

• Our performance: 66% 
• Other housing associations performance: 68% 

Number of compliments received

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It’s just as important to know what we’re doing well so we can maintain this level of service, as well as what we’re needing to improve. It also gives our teams are real boost and  to see the number that we are receiving increase, reflects the great services that our teams provide every day.