Our Customer Promise provides a framework that will allow us to make very clear commitments to our customers.
Many organisations are placing greater emphasis on the importance of the customer voice and looking at ways in which they can better include customers in the decisions that affect them most.
Our new Customer Promise was developed to do just this: putting the voice of the customer at the heart of what we do. The Social Housing White Paper accelerated some of our thinking in this area, but it was something we’d been developing for some time.
Our Customer Promise provides a framework that will allow us to make very clear commitments to our customers and make sure that we are working with them to deliver upon the aims and objectives of the White Paper.
Ultimately, we want to simplify our commitment to our customers so they can hold us accountable for the things they want us to deliver upon. The new Customer Promise is easy to understand and designed in collaboration with customers through our Customer Board.
We know that customers from different backgrounds will have different experiences of us and we want to ensure that we are continuously engaging with our customers and getting valuable feedback, so we can enhance our services. As part of this we have already launched Your Voice, an online engagement platform which allows customers to feedback to us and work more closely with us on topics that are important to them.
We know that the best way to achieve our Customer Promise is by creating an internal culture that clearly understands what our customer commitments are. Every time we interact with our customers, we want people to ask, “how can I help you and your community to thrive?”; if we can do that then we will be delivering our promise. We have mapped out a series of internal activities to be delivered in the coming months that will help to embed this culture.
Like most organisations we already track and review different metrics for measuring success, whether that’s the number of customer enquiries that we are resolving at the first point of contact, engagement and uptake across our digital channels, analysing the energy efficiency of our homes or measuring the continued investment in our capital delivery and home improvement programmes to ensure our homes meet the Government’s decent homes standard.
Our new Customer Promise brings this all together in a framework that our customers can hold us accountable to. It acts as the catalyst to ensure that we continue to put the customer at the heart of everything we do and that we bring the hard work and efforts of our teams right across the business together to ensure that we all have a common goal – to help our customers and their communities to thrive
We were early adopters of the National Housing Federation’s Together with Tenants programme and our continued commitment to work closely with, and to involve customers in decisions about their homes and their neighbourhoods is reflective of this and something that is central to our Customer Promise.
Involving our customers in decisions that affect them and their neighbourhoods is not a new concept, but it does feel like we’re now moving more quickly towards something that helps pull it all together - laying out our promise to our customers and making sure that it delivers on what they are telling us is important to them.