COMPLAINTS PERFORMANCE AND SERVICE IMPROVEMENT REPORT
Internal and external audits • Internally – we work with our internal auditor who carry out internal audits on different parts of the business on a risk-based approach (using things like the risk register) to identify areas of the business to audit. In 2022, an audit was carried out on our complaint handling process and recommendations were made and implemented. • Externally – ARCO (Associated Retirement Community Operators) carry out an annual audit on Anchor to ensure compliance with their Consumer Code. As part of this work our complaints policy, procedure and helpsheet are provided and scutinised. We’ve worked closely with ARCO and made changes and improvements to the complaints policy and associated documents as a result. Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) – see page 9 As this is the first year of publishing the TSMs, we haven’t been able to benchmark with other organisations. Next year we will publish details of how we score against other similar providers. The Regulator of Social Housing will also publish benchmarking information. Making improvements to our service because of learning from complaints Some changes we’ve identified because of learning from complaints required a substantial change to processes and systems. These pieces of work usually become projects due to the scale of the changes and the considerable financial investment required. In this section we explain more about the projects we currently have underway which have been shaped by complaints, satisfaction surveys and resident feedback. Improving the way we handle complaints Over the past two years, we have made considerable investment in improving the way we handle complaints. This work is direct result of listening to residents (via our satisfaction survey) who have gone through our complaint process and understanding how we can deal with their complaints to provide the best experience. It also ensures we are compliant with the Housing Ombudsman Code. The following projects are currently underway: • Complaints transformation We started the complaints working group in December 2022. The group identified areas for improvement and this led to the complaints transformation work which started in April 2023. We used an external consultancy to look at the end-to-end process, using residents’ experiences/feedback from our complaint’s satisfaction surveys and the requirements of the Housing Ombudsman Code. This change will see the Customer Relations team being responsible for responding to complaints as a central team, working closely with relevant colleagues. To test this approach, we carried out a trial of this way of working in the Northwest region of rented housing. We have recruited and trained colleagues and are now rolling this out into other regions. To assist with this, we have increased the Customer Relations team from nine to 24 colleagues.
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