Friday 16 September 2011

Consulting With Customers

I’m confronted with a familiar blogging problem this week: do I risk censure from the comments and spend the next 600 words revelling in THT’s triple success, which comprised of the Health and Well Being Award, the Customer Service Excellence Award and the all-important Gold Award from the Investors in People? I’ll risk your wrath and hope you’ll allow me a paragraph of pride in my staff who have ensured that of the 24,163 organisations (give or take) we are noted as being in the top 1.38% (I can go to more decimal places if you wish). It’s a testament to the continued hard work of our staff and the managers who work to ensure that they are supported.

This week has been unusual as not only have I managed to get a year older, I’ve also been away at the National Housing Federation’s Annual Conference (have a look at the hashtag #nhfannual11 for all the Twitter gossip and reporting from the event). I’ll be rounding up my thoughts on the conference for the blog next week, but this week I wanted to report back on the Customer Day that went on at THT just before I left.

I feel events like our annual Customer Day are essential to establishing and building relationships with our tenants. We are a service provider and we need as much feedback – both positive and negative – as possible to ensure that our customers get the very best service that we can provide. The Customer Day is a chance for interested parties to come and review the annual report, ask questions and learn more about the work we do.

Although no Housing Association ever really struggles to get opinions from tenants, getting them to come and consult with us has proven to be more of a challenge. Last year we had over 100 tenants at the Customer Day but this year, somewhat disappointingly it was just over 80. When you consider that we invite every single THT tenant to the Customer Day, you could argue that it’s a small percentage. I think this puts the incentive back onto us to come up with increasingly interesting and innovative ways of eliciting feedback. A few options we’re already looking at for next year involve fun days, teaming up with other local Housing providers and the always-intriguing possibilities of social media. As ever if you have any thoughts about encouraging this vital participation then let me know.

One of the main jobs that the Customer Day attendees had to do this year was to review the Big Day In… long-list and decide on which projects will be undertaken on October 5th. The Big Day In… is an initiative where we’re attempting to put our commitment to our communities into action. We appealed for ideas everywhere from our Facebook page to speaking directly to tenants for nominations of what people would like to see THT staff doing. The ground rules were simply that any projects had to be achievable in a short space of time and benefit our communities. The response was amazing with over 70 ideas suggested and the breadth and ingenuity of some of them show that crowd-sourcing ideas can produce some great results.

The next step for these winning ideas (full list below) is that between the 10th September and 5th October the top 20 projects will be planned out and on the 5th October they will be carried out by THT staff and, yes, that does include me and the whole Senior Management Team. It was interesting to see that alongside the clear-up projects which identified known and new grotspots, there were also some really innovative projects such as establishing a farmer’s market in front of the new Lostock units to sell local produce to the community.

Another one that caught the eye was the I Love Stretford project which sought to show before and after photos of the area and promote civic pride. It would be terrific if we could capture some of the energy and vitality of the I Love Manchester campaign and help Stretford hold its head up high. Finally, the most voted-for idea was to teach basic DIY skills to local people; a classic example of the “give a man a fish” philosophy. The hope is that with an introduction to these skills, tenants might feel more comfortable undertaking basic DIY work (not that they can’t turn to us if they need help anyway) and who knows where exposure to a new skill might lead…

Top 20 Projects Voted For By Tenants

  1. Learning Basic DIY
  2. Skip day and Community Clean Up
  3. Moorside Road fence painting
  4. Farmers Market in Lostock
  5. All our yesterdays history project
  6. Story time children's centre
  7. Shopping services for the elderly
  8. Jet-washing grotspots in Old Trafford
  9. Clear ginnels in Broadheath
  10. I love Stretford
  11. Building Bridges reading project
  12. garden clearance Granary Way
  13. Welcome to Stretford House floral display
  14. Shrewsbury St Community centre
  15. School Road/Lester St yard planters
  16. Grass and hedge cutting knock on
  17. Clear ginnels in Oldfield Brow
  18. Garden clearing Manor Ave
  19. Baguley Lane and Croft Road clean-up
  20. 120 minute property makeover

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