National Customer Service Week - How we are leading the charge on effective customer service
This week is National Customer Service Week, the Institute of Customer Service’s (ICS) annual initiative that gives an opportunity to reflect on how we serve our customers.
We’ve been working closely with the ICS for over four years, and there’s no doubt that it is members like us, and other like-minded organisations, who have been driving forward the agenda of best practice for customer service. During weeks such as these, we take the chance to celebrate some of the many successes we’ve seen as a result of our improvements and consider our next steps.
Today’s theme is on effective service leadership. The needs of customers across all sectors are evolving and more varied than ever before, and strong leaders can set the tone for improving services by listening to customers, trying out new ideas, and nurturing a positive culture.
For example, we’re wholly committed to ensuring our customers know we’re on hand to answer their queries and concerns, as quickly as possible and through their preferred method of contact. Last year, we saw 40% more customers get in touch with our contact centre. This at times squeezed our services, but we installed a new system that makes it easier and faster to handle queries, making our service more efficient and us more responsive.
This is just one small part of our Customer Services Modernisation Programme, designed to improve the quality of our services to all customers.
Using technology to improve our efficiency has another advantage, as it frees up our teams to provide additional services and support, such as through our new “Home Health Checks” initiative. This sees housing colleagues carrying out home visits look for any issues, or even potential issues in our customers’ homes, meaning these can be sorted much quicker and provide immediate benefits.
There’s a whole host of ways in which we are modernising our services, which you can read about in our latest customer annual report.
We recognise that improvement to our services is a continuous journey, and there’s always more we could be doing. But crucially, it’s customers themselves who are helping us both identify where improvement is needed and what form these improvements should take.
And of course, the ICS community means we’re not acting in isolation. There’s a whole collaborative network, through our suppliers, other housing associations, and other organisations in wholly different sectors who can inspire us, install visionary solutions, and demonstrate best practice in exemplary customer services. We are learning from their examples when it comes to making our own service the best it can possibly be.
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