Taking part in the UKCSI (UK Customer Service Index) survey gives us a great insight into the quality of our customer service, and it helps us understand where we perform well and where we need to do better.
We first signed up in 2019 so we could better understand and measure what our customers think of our services, and what we need to do to improve those services and deliver the customer experience we promise. These are all things which are crucial to us meeting the aims of our corporate strategy and our ambition to be a truly customer-centric organisation, putting our customers not just first but foremost of everything we do.
The customer survey looks at 5 key areas:
- Customer Experience
- Complaints
- Our emotional connection
- Our customer ethos
- Our ethics
Unfortunately, our score was 62.5 this year, (although this is better than our 2019 result of 58.3, it is lower than our 2020 result of 66.1), so we haven’t reached that 70+ goal just yet.
Many organisations are reporting lower scores this year. The pandemic may have had something to do with this, particularly because we had to pause some services for a while. We did improve in some areas, the competence and helpfulness of our people, the speed at which we resolve complaints and the quality of our homes all scored better. The fact that you are proud of your homes and happy with our people is something we can be proud of too.
Although the results are a little disappointing overall, many of the improvements we are already making will start to impact on the things you need us to be better at. Our repairs improvement project, for example, should completely change how your repairs are carried out in future, and our customer communications project should improve how we engage with you. Projects like these have come from your feedback and, hopefully, will help us reach that score of 70+ just as soon as we can.
Thank you to everyone who took part.
