Your customer voice matters to us!

Serving our customers and creating great experiences for you is the best part of our job. At Staffs Housing you matter, and we need you to help us improve your homes and services.

That’s why we’ve developed a customer voice document that sets out how you can use your voice as a customer to ensure you’re heard for both your own benefit and for the benefit of all our other customers. You can read the full document here, or you can carry on reading as we've summarised what we said in that document into easy-to-read digestible chunks below.

Why are we doing this?

We always want our customers to shape our services because you are the ones that use them. But in response to the Grenfell Tower fire the Government published a social housing white paper – The Charter for Social Housing Residents. And it proposes to implement changes to social housing to allow tenants to have more power and allow them to feel protected. There’s a big focus on safety, transparency, accountability and also customer involvement.

We always want you to feel like you have power and that you feel secure in your home, so although these changes aren’t mandatory yet, we’re implementing some changes and commitments to make sure we’re providing the very best service and making it as easy as possible for you to get involved.

What are we doing?

We have six key commitments that ensure you feel empowered:

1. Relationships – we’ll treat our customers with respect and our relationships will be based on openness, honesty and transparency. We’ll make sure we understand how you want to get involved, provide lots of opportunities and give you the training to help you if you need it.
   
   
2. Communication – you’ll receive clear, accessible and timely information from us on issues that matter to you. Including important information on your home, your community, our organization, how we’re performing and what we’re doing to address any problems.
   
   
3. Voice and influence – we’ll listen to you and what you say will be used to inform decisions. Every customer will feel listened to on issues that matter to you and you’ll be able to speak to us without fear.
   
   
4. Accountability – we’ll work in partnership with our customers, you’ll be able to scrutinize and hold us to account for decisions that affect your home, our services and their quality.
   
   
5. Quality – we’ll ensure that your home is good quality, well maintained, safe and well managed. We’ll agree our safety standards with you and tell you how we performed each year.
   
   
6. When things go wrong – we’ll give you advice and support when things go wrong and provide a simple route to raise an issue or to make a complaint. We’ll give you clear timescales and tell you when you can expect a response.
   
   If you are not satisfied, we have a simple appeals process to give you the opportunity to appeal. Then if you’re still not happy with the outcome you can appeal the decision with the Housing Ombudsman.

What is customer involvement?

Customer involvement means you get to have your say to help us manage Staffs Housing in a way that keeps your needs, thoughts and opinions in the center of everything we do. We want to hear from you in as many ways as possible.

How can I get involved?

Currently, there are lots of ways you can get involved and our opportunities are open to all customers. We even have a dedicated team that will help make sure your voice is heard. Take a look at the different ways you can get involved below:

• Join our maintenance group
• Become a mystery shopper
• Join our customer scrutiny panel
• Join our customer assurances group
• Help us develop your online account
• Help us set up new resident groups
• Be part of piloting new customer groups
• Take part in surveys
• Take part in environmental change and the zero-carbon challenge

How can I find out more?

If you would like more information or you want to get involved get in touch with our Customer Involvement Team you can by emailing involve@honeycombgroup.org.uk or calling 01782 743828.