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I’m sure it has come as a huge relief to us all that we’ve passed the latest milestone in the easing of lockdown restrictions.

Our patience has paid off and now we can meet more of our loved ones, go shopping, book an overnight stay and get that much-needed haircut (while still keeping to the restrictions).

What we have learned from the pandemic is that we need to up our game too and listen to our customers even more closely. In this update, I will tell you a little more about what we are doing.

Listening to our customers

One thing I am delighted to report is that our customer advocacy score reached 85% at the end of the financial year. As we are up 3% on 2019 to 2020, this is a clear tribute to the efforts of everyone, particularly our engineers, neighbourhood coaches and contact centre colleagues, working to ensure our customers are safe and enabling you to thrive.

This score is determined by our customers and shows how we are focusing on our customers’ needs. Thank you for scoring us so highly. Your views really matter to us. One of the ways we listen to you and shape our services moving forward is through our customer-led groups across our four localities, known as the Locality Influence Network (LIN) and Customer and Communities Influence Network (CCIN).

We ask customers to volunteer time with us and as well as holding us to account and it is a way for customers to promote the value of social housing, learn new skills and meet new people.

One of our retirement living customers, Andy Dunham, has written a great article about his experiences as chair of the Staffordshire and the Marches LIN. Why not give it a read and find out how you can get involved too? 

Continuously improving

Shortly we will be revealing details about the launch of a brand-new customer portal, enabling customers to have a quicker, easier and more consistent relationship with your landlord online. And in my last update, I told you we would be unveiling YouMatter, a new feedback service to capture the voice of our customers and ensure we work on the things that matter to you most. We will have further details to share with you soon and both seek to put customers at the heart of everything we do.

Supporting you

Please don’t forget that if you need to talk to us, your neighbourhood coach is always on hand to support you with any queries relating to your home, tenancy and your community. You can use our search function to find your neighbourhood coach if you are not already familiar with them.

On a final note, we are dealing with a slight backlog in repairs at the moment so please bear with us. Our focus is on getting every customer an appointment as soon as possible so please use this link to report a repair and thank you for your patience if you are waiting for a repair to be carried out. Our engineers continue to follow covid safety measures and I’d encourage you to play your part too.

Watch our video to find out how we’re keeping our services on the road.

Once again, many thanks for reading this update and I hope you, like me, manage to enjoy some of this nice weather we are having.

Rohini