Customer Care Service Standard
This is a guide for residents to ensure that we are clear about how South Essex Homes promises to treat our customers to make our interactions as easy and helpful as possible. We are committed to providing excellent services so you can enjoy your home. We want to make it easy for you to receive our services. We want you to help shape our policies and practices.
To achieve this we will do the following:
- Always treat you politely, empathetically and with respect.
- Train all our staff in customer care and give them the knowledge and expertise they need to provide the services.
- Make sure we are mindful of our customers’ particular needs and that we use this information to adapt how we deliver services and communicate with you effectively. For example, we have a policy on the ‘reasonable adjustments’ we will make to help residents with disabilities and other vulnerabilities access our services.
- Offer a range of ways to communicate with us including Telephone (freephone), email, online, face to face and social media. You can find this information here: Our Contact Details | South Essex Homes
- Take phone calls from 8.45am to 5pm Monday to Friday.
- Provide and publicise a free emergency phone service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
- Make sure our Contact Centre staff have as much useful information at their fingertips as possible so we can answer your questions when you call.
- We will try to deal with as many matters as we can at the first point of contact. If we do need to transfer your call, we will tell you who you are being transferred to.
- Open our office (the Civic Centre) for visitors from 8.30am to 5.15pm Monday to Thursday and 8.30am to 4.45pm on Friday.
- Have a member of staff available in our office to help you with questions about your tenancy or other housing issues or offer you a convenient appointment to speak to someone face to face.
- Promote and publicise the services we provide.
- Keep all of your personal information confidential.
- Make sure our staff have an ID Badge that is visible and/or you can ask to see.
- Provide a consistent service that covers staff holidays and other absences.
- When staff are on leave or are unavailable, we will ensure that we all use an automatic email message advising customers of the date we are due to return. If you email a ‘team email address’, rather than a named officer, we will ensure that an automatic receipt of email message is generated, so you know that your email has been received.
- Use the newsletter, website and other means to let you know about our services and how we are performing. We will ensure that we are able to provide information to tenants in different languages and formats if they need them.
- Carry out a Tenant Satisfaction Measures Survey with a sample of our customers every year and use other ways of gathering customer feedback. We will tell you what we have learned from this and how it has influenced or changed the way we do things. To do this, we will publish ‘You Said, We Did’ information on our website.
- Tell you how to make complaints. We will record all complaints and learn from them to improve our services.
- Support you to become involved in your community – for example as part of a resident or community group, a block or street voice or member of the Scrutiny Forum.
- We are developing a customer portal, so you can update your information, check your rent account and make service requests to South Essex Homes.
We will not take longer than necessary to provide customers with a reply to their general queries and request for service or advice.
- Where a resident calls us we will try to answer their question immediately or refer them to another officer that can do so.
- Where we cannot answer a customer’s query immediately, or the officer they need to speak to is unavailable, we will make contact to discuss the matter or provide a reply within 3 working days.
- We will aim to reply to any written forms of communication such as emails or letters within 3 working days where the query is relatively simple and straightforward.
- If your query is more complicated and requires additional investigation, we will reply fully within 10 working days.
Please note different time frames and processes are in place when we are responding to formal complaints, caretaking issues, raising repairs and reports of anti-social behaviour. Information on how quickly we deal with these kinds of reports can be found on the relevant webpages.
You can help us by doing the following:
- Being polite to staff. Do not be aggressive or use abusive language.
- Make sure you keep us up to date on your circumstances. For example, any health issues you have that mean you need additional support, any changes to your household, such as new children or if you have a change in your financial circumstances that you need help with or that may impact your benefits. You can report any changes to us here: Update Your Details | South Essex Homes
- Volunteering to represent your street or block.
- Taking an interest in your local community.
- Setting up or helping to set up a tenants’ and residents’ association or community group so the community can speak with one voice.
- Responding to questionnaires or surveys or giving constructive feedback in other ways to help us improve the service.
- Keeping your tenancy conditions in a safe place so that you can refer to them easily.