Our Tenant Scrutiny team regularly carry out projects to test whether the tenant voice is being heard, to make sure you are at the centre of everything we do and that the improvements we make to our service are led by you.
Recently, our My Scrutiny group took a look at how well we keep you informed throughout the repairs process.
Why repairs?
We know how important a timely and high quality repairs service is to you – and keeping you well-informed throughout the process gives you a better overall experience of this service.
As repairs is one of the key drivers of tenant satisfaction, our My Scrutiny group identified communications around repairs as a high priority topic to be investigated and evaluated.
A common theme we found while looking at our repairs satisfaction feedback from our annual Tenant Satisfaction Measure (TSM) results was that a lot of the feedback and complaints we receive around repairs are related to poor communication.
What we found
Although we’ve done a lot to address our communication around repairs over the last few years, through introducing email templates, a new telephony system and the repairs feature on our tenant app, there are still some recurring challenges that we need to address.
Our My Scrutiny Panel found:
- that there was a challenge with follow-on appointments and a lack of communication internally between teams, which made it difficult to answer tenant’s queries and track the progress of the repair
- that we had similar challenges with appointments being moved and there being a lack of communication around why the change had been made
- that there was minimal difference in satisfaction between tenants who let us know about a vulnerability compared to those who haven’t – but that those vulnerable tenants are more at risk of digital exclusion and not receiving regular updates
Our next steps
To help improve our repairs communication and make sure that you’re kept informed throughout your repairs, our My Scrutiny Panel have give us some next steps to combat the challenges they found.
- To look into our repairs communications to make sure that we have ways to get the information out to tenants who may not have access to digital technology
- Improve the information on our website, including more details FAQs around wait time for repairs and about when we might use third-party contractors for our repairs
- Reviewing the process of communicating with tenants when a repair is moved or needs a follow-on appointments, to improve communication internally and make sure tenants are kept informed
We know how important our repairs service is to you, so we want to make sure we get it right. If you need to report a repair, you can get in touch with us on 0345 60 20 540 or reach out via Facebook or X.
If you would like to make an impact on our services and get your voice heard, why not join My Voice and become an Involved Tenant? You can find more information here.
