It’s worth firstly reminding ourselves that housing providers have a unique relationship with their customers, and sometimes these can span a-long time. Connexus, like many others across the country, are on a journey to make sure that those relationships remain resilient, inclusive and that customers have a voice and can genuinely influence decisions about services, their homes, their safety and their communities.
Connexus, as a rural housing provider, knew that sometimes maintaining relationships could be difficult given the topography and challenges areas faced e.g. poor internet signal, services provided differing in each area, but they knew how important involvement from customers was, at all levels, and so became early adopters of the Together with Tenants initiative when it was first launched, with a commitment to make change happen
Together with Tenants itself, reaffirmed that it was a social landlords and Boards responsibility to improve relationships with its customers and that they were now accountable to their customers for everything they did. The Together with Tenants initiative aligned with the organisations corporate plan to become more customer focussed moving forward; and so Connexus’s journey began
It’s simple – we did things differently – we involved our customers – they became the heart of our decision making and we embedded this approach across the organisation.
The first natural step was to look at everything we did, and for us, we actively invited our customers into our ways of working, to review, be involved, BE HONEST, make change happen and to feel empowered. This was, and still is, the key to improving our tenant – landlord relationship. If the tragic events of Grenfell taught us anything, it was that safety comes first, and customers must feel assured that their safety is our number one priority, for them, their families and their homes. It felt natural for us to involve customers within this area as well so that we could review, question our performance and make any necessary improvements. We had a real chance to rethink Landlord Compliance, to strengthen our accountability and ultimately build stronger relationships with our customers, giving them a voice that we act upon within our compliance and health and safety.
We liaised with our customers to develop a safety standard dash board which would incorporate our performance, which they could review and delve deeper into. After some training, we developed a suite of KPI’s (key performance indicators), which after 6 months, customers feel confident enough to drill down into, actively challenge us, formulate question to us, and ultimately it allowed us to review, make change and give our customers their voice within the organisation. We currently present monthly, and the changes in the types of questions we are being asked is amazing – customers are really feeling more confident to challenge us on our performance.
Covid-19 changed the way we did many things as individuals, and how organisations did things too. Compliance, health and safety was no different. During this time we also worked with our customers to change the tone of some of our literature relating to accessing properties during the pandemic. This was a real collaborative way of working and customers felt empowered to suggest changes and different ways to present information.
We have also recruited an involved customer within our Compliance team who has a real passion for compliance and as a result has suggested many changes that we can make in terms of the way we work. So far he has completed mini audits upon our gas safety certification and will be looking at solid fuel and oil systems shortly.
We have also been working with customers in the area of fire safety. We have started a training programme, at the request of our customers, so that they understand what is involved in an FRA (fire risk assessment) and how are we keeping them safe. We are working to roll this initiative out into our housing teams now, to involve customers on our regular block inspections that take place.
There have been a number of positive changes as a result of this work including reviewing our fir safety information on our website, changing this to include information that customers wanted to see.
This week is the National Social Housings Safety and Compliance week and we have been asked to present to other sector professionals about how we are making change happen, involving customers and ultimately making our customers and communities safer. We are very proud to have been asked to be involved and we will be running a few articles this week to give more information about what we do, and how customers can get involved with us to shape our services.
