Customer satisfaction remains an important and high-profile performance measure at Great Places and has been one of our Critical Success Factors since these were introduced in 2014.
As mentioned in last year’s report, in preparation for the introduction of the Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) by the Regulator of Social Housing in April 2023, we took the decision to move away from using the Institute of Customer Service methodology we had used previously. Instead, we introduced a perception-based survey in line with the new regulatory requirements, conducting a pilot in partnership with research agency TLF, surveying over 1000 customers in the year. The result of the initial pilot saw overall satisfaction with the services Great Places provides at 69%, and our Board set an overall satisfaction target for 2023/4 of 70%.
Our TSM results for 2023-2024 showed that we exceeded our target overall satisfaction score target of 70%.
Great Places reports all its TSM results to our Board and Customer Committee and shares these with leaders across the business and with our customers. We have also carried out on a number of deep dives to understand what drives customer dissatisfaction. These deep dives, which have investigated responses to TSM questions about our complaints and repairs services, layer a range of information over the TSM scores given by customers. This has included details of complaints made, and repairs jobs raised by respondents. Deep dives seek to identify trends in customer satisfaction with Great Places based on a range of factors, including property type and age, household make-up, ethnicity and diversity information. Customer comments given alongside the TSM scores are also analysed to identify trends and areas of focus for service areas. Deep dive results are likely to form part of an ongoing agenda for Customer Committee to enable them to monitor any changes in TSM scores following any service improvements.
As a learning organisation we use robust continuous service improvement measures, Service Excellence Groups and projects to focus on improving our customers’ experience by listening to, and acting upon, their feedback.
We have also reported service improvement activity to our customers through our new Annual Complaint and Service Improvement Performance which is also published on our website and shared in our regular customer publications.
