Tenant satisfaction measures

The Regulator of Social Housing has created a new way to assess how well social housing landlords, like us, are doing at providing good quality homes and services. This involves a set of tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) that we must report on. The measures cover areas that matter to you, including repairs, complaints, and anti-social behaviour.  

There are 22 tenant satisfaction measures, with 12 of them coming from the answers our customers give us on our perception survey and 10 from information we collect on our performance.

Each of the TSMs fits into one of these five key themes: 

We’re disappointed that our satisfaction score in this area hasn’t increased more but, during the last quarter, we’ve made some real progress with our customer services.

One of the things that customers told us they found frustrating was the time it takes for us to get back to you when you need us.

In 2023, we made a number of changes based on this feedback to help you get through to us faster and get your issued resolved in the most efficient way possible.

This included recruiting and training new members of staff for our customer services team and, after an initial bedding-in period, our call wait times have halved, with fewer customers getting in touch to complain about this issue. This has led to an increase in satisfaction scores between January and March 2024, and we’re keen to keep up the momentum.

We also launched MyRequests (available through MyHome) enabling customers quickly to request and be granted permission online for a number of typical requests. We also launched a data bank of frequently asked questions that can give you answers without having to call us. 

We know that customers tend to be less satisfied when they have an outstanding repair and we’re working closely with our contractors to improve communication and reduce the number of outstanding repairs.

This is also helping us tackle other issues related to customer satisfaction, such as grounds maintenance, which we know is extremely important to our customers. Work to improve our monitoring of our contractors’ performance has been ongoing for the past year, and we’ve launched a new reporting tool for customers, which makes it easier for customers to not only tell us about issues but also monitor the progress of their queries.

We’ve also been trialling new ways of working to improve our local presence and knowledge and ensure a more joined-up approach to resolving customer issues. Where we’ve trialled this, we have seen a good increase in satisfaction.

We are taking on other feedback that customers are telling us about our customer services, such as customers having to repeat themselves or colleagues not getting back to them. We’re investing in training and better resources to improve record-keeping and contact management to improve your experience.   

The health and safety of our customers is our highest priority, and we can see from these scores that there is some improvement needed to make sure our customers feel safe in their home.

In the past year, we’ve refreshed all of the health and safety information on our website, making this available offline too. This has included updating information on the specific types of properties we have, such as those with balconies, as well as highlighting key steps customers can take to prevent accidents. 

We have also done an in-depth review of our fire safety information so that customers know not only how to prevent fires, but what to do in the event of one. During the past year, we have written to customers living in blocks of flats and high-rise buildings to update them with any changes to fire safety where they live. This has included telling them more about the defend-in-place or full evacuation policies that their building operates. 

Our building safety group, for customers living in high-rise schemes, is a chance for us to get feedback from customers about their concerns, priorities and how our decisions around health and safety are affecting them.

The group works closely with our Building Safety team, which is committed to delivering a quality, localised approach to ensuring each of our high-rise buildings meets the standards set out in the Building Safety Act. 

It’s really important that you feel your views are heard and acted on. We provide lots of ways for you to tell us how you feel, from individual feedback surveys to engagement opportunities such as our Customer Scrutiny Panel and Customer hubb. Find out more about getting involved here.

We know that you want every interaction you have with Stonewater to have a positive outcome. We report regularly on what we’re learning from what customers tell us through complaints, engagement and general feedback so you know that what you tell us really makes a difference.

We’ve been doing lots of work to make sure that you can get help when you need it. We’ve increased capacity in our contact centre and significantly reduced our call waiting time.