OK, you need to find something

At the beginning of 2025/26 we had a several complaints about communal cleaning and grounds maintenance. A proactive survey was carried out with customers who pay for these services to gather further insights and it was also the main topic raised at the Virtual Kitchen Table – a customer-led engagement event.

What we did based on customer feedback

• We have changed our approach to estate inspections. Communities with the most issues are inspected by the Housing Officer every month;  those ranked “amber” being inspected every two months and areas with least issues are inspected quarterly.
• At these inspections, any issues are reported at the time and random door knocks are made to gather feedback from customers. The result has been that a follow-up transactional survey eight months after the initial one saw an increase in satisfaction with communal cleaning and grounds maintenance of 14% and 21% respectively.
• The quarterly STAR survey results show that satisfaction with communal areas amongst LCRA customers has increased by 9% to 56% in 25/26, compared to 24/25.
• Stronger contract management and the nurturing of relationships with our contractor, aAFD, has also played a part in this. We also realise that to push satisfaction up further, this needs a joint approach with planned investment to upgrade communal areas along with timely, good quality responsive repairs.

On rare occasions, the cost to rectify large scale issues in a customer home isn’t cost effective. Plus attempts to fix underlying structural issues don’t always work and cause disruption to the customer over a long period of time and some properties cannot be rectified to achieve our target EPC rating of C or above.

We now have formal process to survey these homes.  An Options Appraisal Panel makes a decision on whether to invest in the home or whether to sell it.

If we decide to sell it a dedicated Lettings Officer works closely with the everyone affected to help them find a new home and support them to make the move as smooth as possible.  Over the past year, we have successfully moved seven households out of poor quality homes and the money raised through selling these is being reinvested into building modern ones

We have regular meetings with Ian Williams and Sureserve to address any problems that can affect customers and delivery of their contracts. Ian Williams are also based at our office at least one day a week.

The positive and honest working relationships have helped us resolve individual concerns and identify and find solutions to problems that have affected a number of customers.

• Staff conduct addressed

Issues associated to conduct have been raised with both Ian Williams and Sureserve, assurances have been provided that internal action has been taken and in a number of cases, those employees at fault no longer work for these companies.

• Delays caused by chargeable repair assumptions resolved

Several complaints identified recurring delays where Ian Williams operatives initially assumed repairs might be rechargeable to customers. These assumptions led to jobs being referred back to Brighter Places for confirmation before works progressed, even when no customer liability was ultimately found. This caused avoidable delays, extended repair times and increased customer dissatisfaction. Ian Williams have since reviewed and updated their approach to recharge assessments to reduce future delays.

• Changes to scheduling

Ian Williams increased the standard appointment slot from 20 minutes to account for the additional travel in and around Bristol in an attempt to stop operatives diaries being overbooked and to reduce same day cancelations.

• A move to text messaging

Through root cause analysis from a series of complaints, Sureserve identified that the reason why appointment letters were not being sent was an issue they had with their mail house. As result, they started to use more reliable text messaging.

During 25/26, we used all colleague meetings to look at complaints, helping colleagues to put themselves in the customer’s shoes, considering their individual set of circumstances and to make everyone more conscious of their actions on a day-to-day basis.

As a result, the Customer First programme was approved by the Customer Experience Committee in 2025 and we launched our  Customer First training programme in April 2026.  This includes a series of interactive learning that will help to reduce the number of complaints that relate to a lack of respect.

An IT upgrade to Web360 in Nov 2024 increased the number of customer interactions being logged correctly. However, Web360 had limitations and expected features didn’t deliver the record logging benefits we wanted. As a result mainly telephone contacts were logged and other customer contact and queries, such as by email, were not visible.  The platform didn’t work well on mobile phones so it couldn’t be used out in our communities and it was used inconsistently by frontline teams.

In April 2026, we rolled out the world’s leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, Salesforce. This will improve record-keeping, automation and improve communication to customers. This scalable product will allow us to continue to develop our IT capability to support service delivery and allow us to better serve our customers.