We’re committed to ensuring you have the best possible experience with us. We love to hear when we’ve exceeded your expectations, as it helps us celebrate what’s working well and motivates our team. On the other hand, if we’ve fallen short, we’d like to know so we can make things right and improve. Your feedback—whether it’s a compliment or a complaint—helps us grow and deliver better services for you.
Reasons to make a compliment
If a member of our team has gone above and beyond, or if you’ve been impressed with the service you’ve received, we’d love to hear about it. Here are some examples of when you might compliment us:
- A team member provided exceptional customer service.
- Repairs were completed faster than expected.
- You received clear and helpful communication from us.
What happens after you make a compliment
After we’ve received your compliment, we’ll log it on our system and ensure your feedback is passed onto the team or colleague you've mentioned. Compliments help us recognise dedication and celebrate success within our team.
Reasons you might make a complaint
Some of the things you can complain to Accent about include:
- Missed appointments
- Not meeting repair standards
- Not dealing with your concerns in line with our policies
We don’t consider anti-social behaviour reports or repair requests to be complaints.
For instance, telling us about a difficult neighbour or broken fence wouldn’t be a complaint. However, you could make a complaint if we don’t resolve the issue when we said we would.
What happens after you make a complaint
After we’ve received your complaint, we’ll log it on our complaints system and get back to you within five working days to confirm by email or post.
Who receives your complaint?
Your complaint will be sent to the team that deals with your problem.
- For repair-related complaints, we’ll send it to Accent’s Technical Hub
- For all other complaints, we’ll send it to Accent’s Housing Hub
How share your feedback
Whether it’s a compliment or a complaint, here’s how you can reach us. The quickest and most effective way is to use our online form.
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Complain via our online form
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Tell a member of Accent staff in person
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Post your complaint to Accent Housing, 3rd Floor, Scorex House, 1 Bolton Road, Bradford, BD1 4AS
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Call us 0345 678 0555 from 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday
Complaint stages
Your complaint might go through multiple stages. We’ll keep you updated throughout the process.
At stage one, we’ll investigate your issue and work out what we think is needed to resolve it, and write to you to let you know what we’re doing.
We aim to do this within 10 working days, but for more complex issues, it might take longer. We’ll let you know if we think it’s going to take longer than expected.
If you’re unsatisfied with our solution, you can ask us to escalate your complaint to stage two. At stage two, your complaint will be reviewed by a senior manager or director and someone will get back to you within five working days.
If your complaint has been reviewed by a senior manager or director, but you’re still unhappy, you can contact the Housing Ombudsman to review your complaint and give you independent advice.
The Housing Ombudsman is an independent UK governmental organisation. It’s not connected to Accent.
Frequently asked questions
Complaints can concern services we provide that you’re unhappy with, for instance, not dealing with problems when we say we will, missing appointments or not meeting our repair standards.
You can’t make complaints about repairs, anti-social behaviour or other issues unrelated to our services.
For repair-related complaints, your complaint will be sent to our Technical Hub via our Customer Liaison Team. All other complaints will be sent to our Housing Hub and sent to the relevant manager.
You’ll hear back from the team dealing with your complaint within five working days, either by email or post. They might want to talk to you to get more information about your complaint.
We always aim to provide a full response within 10 working days, but if it’s a complex issue it may take longer.
If we do need more time to investigate, we’ll let you know and agree on a reasonable timeframe with you. This is usually no more than an extra 10 working days.
Next, we’ll decide the action we’re going to take, and write to you to let you know more information. If you agree, we’ll resolve the complaint.
Afterwards, we’ll send you a survey to ask for your feedback on how we handled your complaint.
If you’re not happy with the solution we’ve suggested, you’ll need to let us know within 20 working days.
After this, we’ll escalate your complaint to stage two of our complaints process.
At stage two, your complaint will be managed by a senior manager or director. They will contact you by email or post within five working days to acknowledge they’ve seen your complaint and might need to speak to you to get more information.
If you’ve escalated your complaint to stage two, we’ll aim to give you a full response within 20 working days. In our response, we’ll let you know what we’ve done to resolve your issue.
If your escalated complaint is complex, it could take up to another 10 working days.
If you’re happy with what we’ve suggested, we’ll close your complaint.
If you’re still not happy with our solutions, we will give you information on how to refer your complaint to the Housing Ombudsman Service.
If you’re a homeowner, you may have extra options – check our complaints policy.
After this, we’ll close your complaint and send you a feedback request.
More information about our complaints process and policies
Our updated complaints and compensation policy
We’ve recently updated our complaints and compensation policy in line with the Housing Ombudsman's new Complaint Handling Code, which was released on 1 April 2024.
Our commitment to improving our complaints process
We’re working hard to improve our complaints process. This includes updating our complaints and compensation policy, outlining how we’ll treat your complaints fairly and professionally, and how we’ll always work to resolve them quickly.
Our new policy is mostly compliant with the Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code, however, there are a few areas we are still working on improving including:
- making sure our customers are aware of our complaints process
- keeping customers updated with their complaint’s progress
- sharing information we’ve learned from complaints
- providing more evidence that we are cooperating with the Housing Ombudsman’s guidelines
We also ask our customers for feedback on complaints via a survey, so we can find out exactly how well we did with our response while collecting extra information and details.
Our board member responsible for complaints (MRC) at Accent is Helen Jaggar. You can find out more about Helen here.
Unacceptable behaviour policy
As part of our new complaints and compensation policy, we’ve also created a new unacceptable behaviour policy which outlines our duty to protect our staff from verbal or physical abuse.
That means that although we understand the stress and frustration that can result from things going wrong, we might step in to address contact or communication that we consider unacceptable.
You can learn more in our new unacceptable behaviour policy, linked below.