You said, we did! How we've been delivering better services for you
It’s really important to us that we listen and respond to the feedback you give us. Whether it’s offering better online services, improving your communities or changing the way we process your reports, we’re always working hard to deliver a better service in response to your comments.
Here are some of the things we’ve done recently to improve our customer services for you:
New online accounts
We’ve created a new portal on our website that’s dedicated to helping you manage your tenancy more quickly and easily online.
Your online account allows you to report repairs, check your rent account, report anti-social behaviour and change your tenancy details in a few easy clicks. Over 600 tenants are already using their online account and enjoying more modern and accessible services. We’re going to be adding more features to the portal soon, so keep an eye out for updates!
New ways of recording your feedback
We’ve changed our systems to improve the way we record your compliments, complaints and comments, allowing us to act on your feedback more effectively and make sure it leads to improvements to our services.
As well as these changes we’ve also responded to a query from the Gateway Membership Team, your tenant representatives, about how we respond to your issues with our service which aren’t classed as formal complaints. As we didn’t have a formal process for these, we have come up with a whole new way of recording feedback to make sure we aren’t missing opportunities to improve. These types of complaint, now known as ‘grumbles’, are issues which can be resolved at first point of contact, but also require monitoring. Now, if you report a grumble, we log and monitor it to see how we can make our services better.
Giving you the chance to get involved
We want you to be able to help shape our services, whatever your lifestyle. With that in mind, we’ve created an ‘Involvement Menu’ so that if you want to get involved, you can find an option that suits you. With everything from volunteering your time by email to joining our Gateway Membership Team, we’ll work with you to help you choose the option from the menu that suits you.
Read our Involvement Menu for more information!
Getting to know you
In order to deliver services that best suit your needs, we’ve been asking you to provide key information about your background in our surveys and tenancy audits. By collecting this information, we can get to know our residents better, and ultimately tailor the events, communications and services we provide to give the best outcome for you and your area.
Finding out how we’re performing
We’ve introduced more satisfaction surveys, so that we can ask you how we’re doing in more aspects of the service we provide. For example, our post-call surveys help us to find out how well we’re handling your calls, and surveys on our cleaning and grounds maintenance are helping us to determine how our contractors are performing.
We also now benchmark ourselves with a Net Promoter Score, which enables us to compare ourselves to other housing organisations and other types of businesses too.
Improving our community impact
By asking our improvement programme partners, Engie, to commit to working with the community in our contract with them, we ensure that our residents benefit from more than just home improvements through the programme. Engie have provided people in Watford with jobs, apprenticeships and training, as well as new kitchens! In the future, we’ll be making sure that community engagement gets written into even more of our contracts.
Implementing our service standards
To let you know what you can expect from us, we sent every resident a copy of our service standards booklet. It tells you exactly what our services cover, so you can know when we’re working well and hold us accountable if we fall below the standards we expect to meet. You can find a copy of the service standards booklet on our website.
Training our staff to the highest standard
We know that one of the most important parts of your experience with us is the people you speak to. That’s why we’re always training our staff to improve their skills and to enhance their ability to provide the best service for you. Whether it’s improving qualifications or sharing tips on the best practices, we’re doing lots to ensure everyone is working well for you.
Your Gateway Membership Team
Your Gateway Membership Team (GMT) represents you and helps shape our services to make sure they meet tenants’ expectations. This year, we have some new GMT members, and a new chair. That means fresh new ideas, wider representation and more impressive leadership.
What are we going to be doing next?
We’re going to keep improving our services for you. Coming up, we’re going to be:
- Delivering a new, modern and user-friendly website
- Creating a ‘customer journey’ map, so we can improve the way your queries are dealt with
- Training our staff to become even better at providing services for you
Getting accredited by the Institute of Customer Service
We’re working with the Institute of Customer Service to improve the service we deliver. This involves thoroughly demonstrating our level of customer service, professionalism and the improvements we’re making in order to achieve a nationally recognised accreditation. This is an opportunity to show that we’re committed to upholding the high standards we set, and will allow us to compare our customer service with that of other organisations.
As part of the accreditation, we’d like to hear what you think about our customer services, and the changes we could make in the future. We’ve created a survey - which should take no longer than 5 minutes to complete - so you can easily share your thoughts.
Take the survey here!
We want to keep hearing from you!
If you have any feedback for us, please get in touch on feedback@wcht.org.uk or by calling us on 0800 2182247.