We work hard to try to understand our customers and to improve based on what people tell us. We get feedback in lots of ways including our My Voice online community, Insight Committee, complaints, face-to-face interviews and regular surveys. These surveys alone were completed by around 2,000 customers last year.

In 2022-23 the Government asked all housing associations to start asking customers 12 specific questions known as Tenancy Satisfaction Measures (TSMs). These cover repairs, building safety, engagement, neighbourhood and complaints management, alongside overall satisfaction with our service.

We piloted these TSM in the last three months of the year, ahead of the official data collection period which began in April and here’s what we found for customers living in homes that meet the Government’s definition of ‘low cost rental accommodation’.

Some of these questions are the same as, or similar to those in our own surveys over the last few years. This allows us to compare how the TSM results compare with our own past performance, as well as other housing associations. So, for example, we have increased our overall customer satisfaction by 11 percentage points since we first started tracking this back in 2019.

We are learning a lot from the news measures, for example:

  • We score above the benchmark average (based on 31 similar organisations) for most of the measures. Our strengths are in building safety, treating customers fairly and with respect, and with repairs.
  • We do less well around neighbourhood management. Customer comments suggest that this is because they would like to see us out and about more – something we are already working on.
  • Despite scoring lower than hoped for complaint handling, we are in line with the benchmark average. This needs further investigation as some customers who said they had complained had not actually made a formal complaint so they would not have gone through our process.

We’re already making a lot of changes in response to what we’ve found. This includes:

  • Restructuring the Neighbourhoods team with a greater emphasis on work in the community.
  • Reviewing our customer communications, to understand how we can improve.
  • Updating how we carry out customer surveys so that we can better understand what we’re doing well and where we need to improve.
  • Developing a new TSM report for our website so that customers can better see how we’re performing.