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We will treat you and your home with respect and courtesy.

If English isn’t your spoken language and you need translation, we’ll make sure an interpreter is provided.

 

We will make our services accessible by telephone, letter, email, the internet and other digital channels.

We will listen and capture information carefully and use this to resolve your queries effectively.

We will display our office opening hours outside of our reception area, on our website and in our newsletter.

We will provide you with emergency contact details when our office is closed.

We will make it easy for you to raise a complaint if we get things wrong.

When you contact us in writing we will provide an acknowledgement within 3 working days and respond within 5 working days.

When you contact us by phone:

• We will aim to answer your phone call within 3-5 minutes.
• You will be greeted by a colleague who will provide their name and job role at the start.
• We will run security checks to confirm your identity.
• We will offer to call you back should we need to place you on hold.

When you visit our office:

• We will offer to meet with you in a private area if your enquiry is confidential.
• We will provide a fully accessible, comfortable and welcoming area for you.
• We will see you on time if you have an appointment.
• We will aim to see you within 15 minutes if you have no appointment.

When our staff or contractors visit you at home:

• They will make an appointment in advance wherever possible.
• They will present their identification card and confirm the reason for their visit.
• They will leave a calling card if you’re not at home for an arranged appointment with details of how you can re-arrange.

We will provide you with clear, accessible and timely information on key issues. This will include:

• Information about your home and local community.
• How we are working to address problems.
• Information about how Brighter Places is performing.

We will request and maintain accurate information about you and take this into account to provide you with the best possible service, without prejudice.

We will treat your personal information with the utmost care and uphold our data protection obligations.

We will be honest about what we can and cannot do and we will do the things we say we’ll do.

Colleagues will take individual responsibility for dealing with your query.

We will seek to continually improve our customer care.

 

If we’re unable to help you e.g. when your query requires a service Brighter Places doesn’t provide, we’ll aim to refer you to a more suitable organisation or service.

In 2021, 48 residents attended one of our drop-in sessions to help us set the levels of service they expect for customer care.

We used these conversations to draft some customer care standards and then consulted again online to refine and prioritise them.

The standards focus on treating residents with respect, developing trust through the way we work, ensuring excellent communication, maintaining secure and accurate data and dealing with you fairly, honestly and consistently.

These statements strongly reflect agreed standards within United Communities and Solon and add some new ones.

We will continue to review the standards so they remain relevant and we monitor performance against these standards. We will report on our performance to residents via the engagement panel and other channels.