We've achieved a Customer Service Excellence accreditation

For the second time, we have achieved an accreditation which recognises our approach to customer services.

The Customer Service Excellence accreditation is nationally recognised and aims to highlight good practice organisations and their approach to delivering excellent customer service.

This is the second time we’ve achieved it and we’ll have it for three years. It focuses on three key areas of our customer service; engagement & consultation, customer satisfaction and leadership, policy & culture.

We were audited across key themes to identify areas we’re performing well and how we can improve, which is the main reason we decided to do the accreditation again.

During the process, we were audited on customer insight, our culture, information and access, how we deliver our customer service and the quality of it.

Becky Johns, our Customer Service Manager, said: “We’re delighted to have achieved this accreditation again. We value our customers and always aim to give the best possible service we can. What’s great about the accreditation is that we can see where we’re doing well, but it also indicates where we can improve and do even better.

“It was really great to be recognised for our commitment to equality and diversity, and the way we work with harder to reach groups. We do a lot of with our staff and tenants to highlight different aspects of equality and diversity, so to have this highlighted by the auditors was brilliant.”

An area which was awarded ‘compliance plus’ was our culture and our approach to equality and diversity. We’ve even been asked to share our good practice with other organisations.

It was also recognised that we have made a shift in the way we engage with our customers to meet the needs of our customers. An example of this was introducing a new procedure for using Facebook as a customer service channel, to improve the service we offer to our  customers. The launch of the brand new tenant portal was also included in the report, which offers customers another way to contact us.