Tenant Satisfaction Measures update – 2023/24
We’ve published our latest results against the Tenant Satisfaction Measures, which includes feedback collected from almost 1400 residents between April 2023 and the end of March 2024
The latest results are available to view on our Tenant Satisfaction Measures page.
We use the feedback collected to identify areas of dissatisfaction that require improvement. Our focus is on addressing these areas to improve resident satisfaction.
Our overall scores for the tenant satisfaction surveys completed during the year show that 17% of residents were dissatisfied. We will scrutinise these figures to understand the underlying reasons behind residents’ dissatisfaction and take targeted actions to address them.
69% of residents said they were very satisfied or satisfied with settle as a landlord and a further 14% were neutral which meant that 83% of residents were satisfied, or okay with settle.
When it comes to residents feeling safe in their homes, almost 15% of those surveyed said that they don’t feel safe in their homes. We are working to understand the reasons behind these dissatisfactions and reaching out to residents for feedback through things like our Big Door Knock, neighbourhood action weeks and feedback from our Voice of the Resident Panel.
Positively, 75% of residents told us they felt safe in their homes and that they were treated fairly and with respect.
Repairs
Tenants most frequently referred to the repairs service, particularly the timescales to complete repairs and outstanding repairs as an area in need of more improvement.
22% were dissatisfied with the overall repairs service, while 30% of residents surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the time taken to complete a recent repair after they reported it.
We know that providing repairs more quickly and keeping residents informed about the progress of a repair or what will happen next is the most important thing we can do to improve overall satisfaction. Our target is to complete 90% of routine repairs within 28 days. We ended the year (31 March 2024) having completed 72% of repairs within target, reducing the average days to complete from 29 days in 2022-23 to 26 days in 2023-24.
We have a repairs improvement plan in place and will continue our focus on delivering this and the improvements needed.
We have also increased use of our text message facility to update residents on when their repair will take place.
We will continue focusing on reducing our overall number of open jobs so that we are able to book new repairs in more quickly. We expect to increase the volume of repairs we complete within the 28-day target to 78% by September 2024. We will continue to review our targets and provide monthly progress updates on our website.
How we handle complaints
Throughout the year, we have continued to work hard to ensure we respond to complaints quickly, putting things right and learning from when things have gone wrong. We have seen ongoing strong performance with 98% of all complaints responded to within the Housing Ombudsman timeframes.
While only 36% of residents surveyed said they were satisfied with our approach to handling complaints we’ve been looking at this and found that only 18% of residents surveyed had submitted a formal complaint to settle. Dissatisfaction may be due to some residents answering this question based on their experience, perhaps reporting a service request, a complaint about anti-social behaviour or something that is happening in their neighbourhood, without having raised this as a formal complaint to us.
We are committed to improving our complaint handling processes to ensure residents know their rights and what to expect from us when things go wrong. We will always:
- Call residents in the first instance or contact them by their preferred method of contact to ensure we fully understand their complaint and the outcome they are hoping for.
- Let residents know how long it is likely to take and any next steps.
- Provide residents with a point of contact for any questions they may have.
We will also continue to improve how we handle complaints. This year we have set all colleagues at settle an objective focussed on the areas we know are important to residents: improving communication, responding to complaints promptly and learning from when things have gone wrong.
Communication
15% of residents were dissatisfied with how well we keep them informed about things that matter. Almost 70% were satisfied, but we know that we need to improve how we are keeping residents updated on things like repairs and to always be clear on any next steps we are taking so residents understand what’s happening.
Some of that the improvements we have introduced during the past year include:
- In November ’23 – a ring back service where residents can now request a call back rather than waiting in a queue.
- In December ‘23 – we successfully reduced the number of days it was taking us to respond to residents who contacted us through our website to five working days.
- In February this year – we relaunched Live Chat which you can access now on the bottom right-hand corner of our Contact Us page. We’re working to roll this out on the customer portal and other pages across the website.
- In addition, we recently began trialing video calling. Our colleagues in the Hub will offer a video call to help with diagnosing a repair.
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Communal areas
27% of residents told us they were dissatisfied with how well we keep communal areas clean and well maintained.
We are continuously working to act on the feedback we’ve received to improve on our services and aim to make sure dissatisfaction is less than 20%.
Some of the improvements we have introduced recently in response to resident feedback include:
- More frequent and regular post-inspections to ensure quality of work in our communal spaces and green areas. We are planning to carry out random quality audits and use these outcomes to review and help influence the shape of our services going forward.
- Agreeing a new window cleaning contractor which we aim to be in place from the middle of the summer 2024.
- Identifying where we can make improvements to our overall soft landscape features with things like additional planting and cleaning of pathways.
Throughout the year (March 2023 to April 2024), we also carried out neighbourhood action days where dissatisfaction around the quality of the neighbourhood and communal spaces was lowest to help us to understand how residents feel and what we could do to make improvements.
Trust and Effort
We were really pleased to see that resident feedback for trust and effort was at its highest since we first started reporting against these measures as part of our plan from 2019 to 2024. We had a target for the year to achieve a resident trust score of 7.2 [where the higher the score the better], we achieved 7.4.
For resident effort, we had a target of below 4 [where the lower the score the better], we achieved 2.83. The scores we have achieved are driven by the resident engagement we have completed throughout the year as well as making sure to listen and put plans in place where improvements are needed.
