As part of our Corporate Plan, Here For Our Customers, we’ve committed to delivering a consistently great service, designed alongside customers and colleagues, that’s easy for everyone to use and that truly meets our customers’ needs. Our Customer Experience Strategy sets out how we will do this over the next three years and how we will ensure we’re delivering brilliant basics consistently.
We’re committed to working together as one team, with a clear focus on putting customers at the heart of everything we do. Our partners, including contractors and third-party providers, also play a vital role in delivering services on our behalf. In line with our Corporate Plan, we’ll make sure they meet the same high standards we set for ourselves, while building strong partnerships that enhance and support the services we offer.
To help focus our ambitions, we’ve planned the next three years around four core pillars.
Our end goal is to improve customer experience based on delivering brilliant basics consistently – leading to improved satisfaction, positive feedback and reduced complaints. The Customer Experience Strategy is key to delivery of the “Great for Customers” element of the Corporate plan and works alongside our other key strategies including the Repairs, IT and People strategies.
Customer Experience refers to how we, as Great Places, engage and connect with customers and how customers feel after interacting with us. We want customers to feel listened to, informed, understood and supported.
To do this, we will engage with customers around their needs, and how they want to see services designed and delivered – and we will design customer experiences based on understanding, via data, insight and our customer voice. We will implement customer-led processes that are easy to understand and navigate, and ensure the right culture, capacity, systems, technology and wider business support is in place in order to help colleagues to deliver right first time service and great customer experience.
This strategy has been developed in line with our Corporate Plan “Here for Customers” aligning with our vision of Great Homes, Great Communities and Great People and our values:
It has been developed based on extensive customer feedback – including a bespoke engagement exercise with approximately 1,000 customers. This highlighted three things that are most important when it comes to experience:
Great Places has a diverse portfolio with circa 26,000 homes that are owned or managed. Census data tells us we work across some of the most diverse, and at times disadvantaged, communities in the North of England. Within our homes, we have a diverse customer base and their varying needs are considered in this strategy.
We hold 77.6% of EDI data for general needs and Independence and Wellbeing customers (as of February 2025). Our known data highlights that whilst we have a mainly white population, we have a significant population of Asian or Asian British and Black and African, Caribbean or Black British customers. We also have an ageing population, and a number of customers that have a physical or mental disability. Tailored support and adjustments needed by our customers include things such as adaptations, coaching and support provision, and different communication or access arrangements – including around neurodiversity, visual or hearing impairment, or languages.
In line with our Corporate Plan, we will continue to work hard to ensure we hold the right information about customers so that our colleagues can tailor how they work with individuals and are able to offer additional support where it’s needed. We will design and deliver homes and services in line with customer requirements, in a flexible and accessible way that reflects our diverse communities and wide geography.
This strategy reflects regulatory and statutory requirements. This includes Housing Ombudsman guidance – particularly the code and spotlight reports on “Attitudes, respect and rights” and “Knowledge and Information Management”. It considers the Regulator of Social Housing’s Consumer Standards – particularly the Transparency, Influence and Accountability standard. Consideration has been given to the Better Social Housing Review which noted that many tenants face structural inequalities, especially people from black and minority ethnic communities, those with disabilities and single parent households.
This strategy should be considered alongside other factors such as the wider external operating environment for the housing sector such as ongoing financial, supply chain, skills, and resourcing pressures, technological advancements, cost of living crisis and increased customer awareness and expectations/demands on services.
Customer Experience is not limited to a single team or touchpoint. It’s the sum of interactions along a customers’ journey starting with awareness of our services. Interactions span across services and our ability to respond well, relies on support from our central teams as well as contractors and partners. How we deliver services and communications for customers informs experience – whether that be allocating homes, providing support and advice, carrying out repairs or tenancy visits dealing with ASB, complaints or contacts via our Hub. Customer experience is everyone’s job and the resources needed to deliver this strategy are widespread.
Our Service Delivery Framework (SDF) is clear about how we should deliver in practice – via six guiding principles:
The above principles are reflected through the objectives within this strategy.
Aim – To ensure fair and equitable outcomes for our customers by knowing who our customers are and tailoring delivery in line with what they need.
This part of our strategy sets out our EDI commitment and the key outcomes we wish to see with regard to customer related Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
At Great Places we are committed to improving equality and inclusion across our services and communications to ensure all customers feel they have fair access and feel treated with fairness and respect. We celebrate diversity and recognise that our customers are individuals with different needs and we aim to tailor our services accordingly. We appreciate that customer circumstances or related vulnerabilities are not static – we will respond accordingly and support customers in a flexible way.
In delivering fair and equitable outcomes as part of this strategy we will:
Aim – To ensure we deliver services that customers want and need by listening to our customers.
Customer Driven services have been embedded into law through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. Tenant Satisfaction Measures and Consumer Regulation will see landlords held to account in new ways. Insight, customer voice and co-production will drive the design and delivery of services at Great Places, reflecting regulatory requirements.
In delivering customer driven services as part of this strategy we will:
Aim – We want customers to feel they are receiving consistently great services from us that meet their needs.
Customer Experience is informed by every interaction a customer has along their journey with us. A customers journey with us can be property or service related – but can also be one that includes changing life experiences such as health issues, retirement, having children, job changes – which will have an impact on the services needed or how they are delivered. We will design experiences based on what is important to customers.
In delivering great customer experience as part of this strategy we will:
Aim – To provide the foundations for colleagues to deliver brilliant basics.
In order to deliver brilliant basics for our customers – we need to work as one business to align our processes, systems, technology and culture and make sure that they’re underpinned by customer data and insight about how customers interact with us. In making services easy for customers to use – we need to harness technology and make our processes simple. Our partners and contractors will need to support our ethos of doing the basics brilliantly.
This strategy needs to read across to our IT strategy – ensuring appropriate use of digital and AI technology to ensure accessible services, that provide instant support and deliver streamlined experiences for customers. We also need to provide better tools for our colleagues to support them to be more effective – including easy-to-use systems and processes.
The People strategy will be key to ensuring we build a culture that ensures we are “here for our customers” and that service delivery through colleagues supports great customer experience. We will embed a customer-centric attitude and approach across all our teams and with our partners and contractors, so we deliver with empathy – and ownership. It’s important that customers can trust us to deliver what we say we’ll deliver. We will work on our culture to ensure a focus on working effectively together and breaking down silos to do the right thing for customers, with good two-way communication at the heart of this. Supporting our colleagues to do this will mean putting in place the right training, development, and leadership as well as ensuring we have the right capacity to deliver the right things.
In delivering operational excellence as part of this strategy we will:
Overall target for strategy – Achieve C1 rating
Managing budgets and VFM is key in delivering this strategy – to ensure we use budgets for biggest impact, based on what customers need. We must focus more on ensuring our spend is on delivery of quality services and a proactive approach rather than dealing with failure demand and a reactive approach and consider automation and the efficiencies that technology can bring.
Customer retention is important in terms of reduced turnover costs as is the right support and access to services for customers to enable them to pay rent and other charges.
The key costs in delivering this strategy include:
The costs of delivering great customer experience span the whole organisation – and will be reflected through the costs of delivering all front facing activity as well as the work of central teams to support activity around culture and leadership, systems and technology, communications and processes.
Through working with customers to improve services we hope to ensure efficient and value for money services and reduced waste through delivering brilliant basics. Through procurement and effective management of relevant third-party services we will ensure focus on value for money.
There will be cost implications of meeting the needs of our diverse customers through tailored services and investing in service improvements, technology and systems etc – we will need to review our offer alongside business priorities and spend in the round and factor this into the Business Plan review process – ensuring a reasonable, and affordable approach to tailored delivery. We will experience costs in relation to meeting Housing Ombudsman requirements and recommendations as well as those of the Regulator of Social Housing
The risks involved in pursuing this strategy include:
These risks will be mitigated by regular review of progress against Corporate Plan priorities in line with business planning and budget assumptions. Regular review and reporting through our risk register will ensure the Board have assurance that, if the risks do materialise, mitigating action will be taken.
This strategy will be monitored in line with the delegations set out in the Code of governance, ensuring relevant oversight by Board, Customer Committee and other relevant committees, Executive team and directors.
Operational delivery and performance will be monitored via Customer Service Directors Team on a quarterly basis – with relevant Service Excellence groups (SEGs) ensuring oversight of relevant individual actions within the delivery plan and related performance.
A C1 Regulatory grading would be recognition of success alongside the measures outlined above. This strategy informs the approach with regard to the Transparency, Influence and Accountability standard – other strategies including the communities strategy and Asset management strategy also influence this outcome.
This strategy will connect with our annual communication plan and campaign planner.
This strategy links to the following policies:
Our customers will continue to feel valued and respected by the organisation. Services delivered will be tailored to their needs. Services will be accessible, and information will be available in alternative formats. We will ensure that our customers are treated fairly, and their differences are recognised and celebrated, creating diverse and inclusive communities.
In delivering this strategy, and associated improvement plan we will be enabling our customers to live in their home and communities in a sustainable and independent manner. Customers will be supported to manage their homes in an environmentally friendly manner, and information on the actions that we are taking to reduce our carbon footprint will be communicated in an accessible way.
