Repairs, upgrades and customer feedback
Customer satisfaction with their new home – 2022/23
Satisfied with the services from SYHA
Satisfied with the area as place to live
Satisfied with the contact from SYHA
Satisfied with your new home
We completed these upgrades for our customers…
158 kitchens
204 bathrooms
158 central heating boilers
79 windows and doors
For our customers with additional needs, we also upgraded…
31 kitchens
42 bathrooms
28 boilers
External decoration to five homes
We’ve also made improvements to the outside spaces at Browning Court and Cuthbert Bank.
Customer satisfaction with upgrades
Notice given acceptable – 95%
Operatives polite and courteous – 100%
Overall satisfaction with work – 93%
Overall customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction with our overall service: 83% satisfied or very satisfied
Customer satisfaction with our services is very important to us. For 2022/23, 83% of the customers we surveyed said they were satisfied.
Feedback from our satisfied customers has included…
Comments from our dissatisfied customers tell us that if things go wrong, we aren’t always putting things right. We’ve listened to feedback about people being affected by the difficulties we’ve had with one of our repairs and servicing contractors, and we’ve also had some questions about services charges.
Here are examples of some of the things we are doing, or have done, to improve customer satisfaction:
- Improving how we handle complaints
- Reviewing our customer service standards
- Stopped working with a less responsive repairs and servicing contractor
- Worked with our Customer Scrutiny Panel to review how we communicate with our customers about service charges – learn more about about the changes we’ve made.
Looking forward – Tenant Satisfactions Measures
Tenant Satisfaction Measures are a new system for measuring social housing landlords’ performance, and will capture how well social landlords are doing at providing quality homes and services.
The 22 measures offer a mixture of performance information. 12 of the measures are based on customer satisfaction and feedback, and 10 are based on data we collect (for example, how quickly we have responded to a complaint).
The results will enable social housing customers to scrutinise how well their landlord is doing on a range of areas including completing repairs, keeping homes safe, and engaging with customers. We’ll use the results from the Tenant Satisfaction Measures to provide more insight into what we’re doing well, and where and how we can make improvements.
The government’s website has more information about the Tenant Satisfaction Measures. Our first year’s results will be available for you to look at in the spring/summer of 2024.
First time fix for repairs – 88% satisfied or very satisfied
Customer satisfaction with our repairs service – 88% satisfied or very satisfied
Customer satisfaction with our handing of anti-social behaviour – 80% satisfied or very satisfied
We are pleased that this exceeds our targets for our repairs service. We have added extra resource to our work on damp, mould and condensation (DMC) – this means we can identify and fix problems earlier, and complete remedial treatments quickly. We’re working closely with our in-house repairs teams and our contractors to support them to offer a great service and meet service level agreements.
We are pleased that the satisfaction with the outcome of anti-social behaviour (ASB) cases has risen to 80%. To make these improvements, we have ensured that we set realistic expectations of what we can achieve when we first receive a report of ASB. We also try to establish a clear understanding about how we address ASB and what will happen if the behaviour continues, and we’ve stayed in regular contact with customers to provide them with updates.
Customer complaints
This year, we responded to 286 complaints – this is a similar number of complaints to the previous year. We have continued to build our employees’ complaints handling skills, which has included improving our response times and understanding how we can take action quickly.
Meet the Housing Ombudsman event on 14th November 2023
The Housing Ombudsman supports social housing customers and landlords to resolve complaints and disputes. Their fair, independent and impartial service is free for social housing customers.
Customers and tenants that live in an SYHA home are invited to join our free event to find out more about the Housing Ombudsman and the work they do.
You can join us online or in-person. Find out more about the event and sign up on Eventbrite.
Let us know if something’s gone wrong
We want our customers to tell us if something’s not right. Please let us know by getting in touch or making a complaint, and we’ll work with you to resolve it.
Our work on damp, mould and condensation
Our work on tackling damp, mould and condensation (DMC) has continued and intensified over the past twelve months.
Governance
Our Board approved the measures that they want to see to ensure our effective management of DMC, and we are now reporting our performance to our Board and Health & Safety Committee. We have also formalised our approach to managing DMC in a revised policy and procedure – this ensures that have a consistent response that our customers can hold us to account on.
A holistic approach
We have expanded the work of the DMC working group to be a Decent Homes Taskforce. This is because we recognise that effectively managing DMC can help to keep your home safe and secure, but there are other factors that can affect the quality of your home. We’re expanding our work to ensure that all our customers live in a place they’re proud to call home.
We’re also using learning from past cases of DMC, and using new information and best practice, to inform our work. This includes proactively completing works in property types that we now understand are at a higher risk of DMC issues.
Our Eyes Wide Open campaign ensures that all our employees are aware of the causes, signs and impacts of DMC, and that everyone takes responsibility to report any issues and make sure our customers’ homes are safe.
Meet Andy
Andy has worked in our Home Maintenance Team for 31 years, and started his new role as DMC Officer in April 2023. He supports our customers through the process of resolving DMC issues, and works with our teams to effectively manage reports of DMC.
If you have damp, mould or condensation in your home, please let us know on 0800 1380 380 or repairs@syha.co.uk. You can also get in touch if you have any other issues, including if you’re struggling to heat your home or pay your bills – we’re here to help.
Next – Growing what we do well
