Supporting clients to deliver transformational change for their tenants

To mark Customer Service Week 2022, Pre-contract and Customer Director, George Mallon, shares his thoughts on how contractors should be working closely with their clients to help them reach their customer service goals.

When the Government published the Social Housing White Paper in November 2020, they set out to deliver a new charter for social housing residents and set new requirements on their landlords.

As a contractor, Liberty is not bound by the outcome of the White Paper, however as a responsible business and close partner to over 60 registered social landlords across England and Wales, we wanted to align our processes to ensure we were supporting our clients to deliver the transformational change that the White Paper aimed to deliver.

Liberty has always supported clients with a mix of formal and informal customer satisfaction reporting, and aligned our processes to the individual needs of clients across the country. But when the White Paper was published, we saw the need for standardisation, and a greater mirroring of our processes to those that clients follow in order to make their lives easier, and give them easy access to the data they need.

We were well placed to do this for our clients, as we already had intelligent systems in place for collection of customer feedback, which were already being successfully utilised to drive market leading customer satisfaction with our services, achieving a Net Promoter Score of +60 at the end of the last financial year, and a Trustpolit trust score of 4.2 stars, against an industry average of 2.5.

Under the new requirements of the White Paper, landlords will be required to collect and report on satisfaction with repairs, however the reporting requirement will be high level and will not distinguish between different contractors, delivering different services.

In order to support our clients and their tenants to dig deeper and understand more from the satisfaction data, we have implemented  now, the Tenant Satisfaction Measures questions that our clients will need to start asking from 1st April 2023 specifically related to our performance. s These questions will be asked within our own industry leading satisfaction data which is requested on 100% of completed jobs, giving a more accurate view of performance and satisfaction.

We’re sharing this data with clients through annual contract statements, and in client meetings to assist with day-to-day contract management. And by doing this we are able to work with clients to identify areas for improvement in our service and celebrate when we’re doing well.

By taking this proactive approach to data visibility, and ensuring a fully aligned processes that support our clients’ goals, Liberty is striving ahead as a proven leader in customer service in the property services sector as we continue our mission to be the go-to people for property services.