One Vision Housing (OVH)
You Said, We Did! Board Edition: Complaints Handling 2024/25
Introduction
The OVH Board is responsible for setting the association's goals, overseeing performance, and ensuring strong governance and leadership.
As a vital part of the organisation, the Board:
- Sets direction by deciding what OVH stands for (our values), what it wants to achieve (our vision), why it exists (our mission), and how it plans to get there (our strategies). They also make sure everyone follows these principles to ensure OVH’s long-term success.
- Approves plans and are responsible for establishing a system for approving strategies, policies and plans to help OVH achieve their goals and objectives.
- Oversees finances by ensuring financial stability by making sure financial reports are accurate, approving yearly budgets, and approving OVH’s yearly plan for how it will operate. This also ensures funding is available for the development of new homes.
- Provides protection by looking for potential problems (risks) and making plans to manage and report any risks to keep OVH’s assets safe.
- Tracks progress by monitoring OVH’s performance to ensure OVH is achieving good customer satisfaction results, following their plans and sticking to their budget. Results are also compared with similar organisations to ensure best practice.
Board Member Spotlight: Peter Crosby (Member Responsible for Complaints)
Member Status: Non-executive Director
Prior to retirement, Peter worked for 29 years within the Merseyside and North West social housing sector as a hands-on senior finance manager focusing on financial reporting, analysis, planning and administration. He concluded his career as the Group Head of Financial Services at the Regenda Group, a major North West-based Registered Provider.
In addition to his wide-ranging finance experience, Peter has worked extensively across many key operational headings, including Asset Management and Development, I.T., and Rent and Service Charges.
Peter has been a Sefton resident for 60 years; he is passionate about the local built environment and believes access to quality, affordable and well managed housing is a basic human right.
Within the OVH Board, Peter has been appointed as the Member Responsible for Complaints and will lead on the responsibility for OVH’s complaint handling. As part of the role, Peter will assess themes and trends, as well as policies and procedures where applicable, to help ensure a positive complaint handling culture.
You Said, We Did!
Handling Complaints: A View from the Board
"As the Board Member responsible for overseeing customer complaints, I understand that customer feedback is essential to the services we provide. OVH are committed to actively listening and responding to your views, gathered through surveys, resident meetings, online platforms, and, importantly, through the complaints process.
Your experiences, whether positive or negative, directly influence our service delivery, and I am dedicated to ensuring your insights help us to drive meaningful improvements. We treat all complaints with the utmost seriousness, analysing them to identify recurring issues and areas where we can enhance our services. My understanding of the evolving housing sector leads me to prioritise OVH's complete alignment with the Regulator for Social Housing's new Consumer Standards. These standards rightly prioritise resident engagement, and we are working diligently to demonstrate our commitment to this principle.
I am committed to ensuring your views are actively incorporated, including those raised through complaints, into our decision-making processes, so that OVH can remain a truly customer-focused organisation. We strive for transparency and accountability, and we firmly believe that by listening attentively to your voices, including those expressed through complaints, we can collectively build a better customer experience for all.
On behalf of the Board, thank you for your ongoing feedback. We look forward to sharing further improvements with you in future updates. Your insights are crucial in helping us shape a better service for everyone."
- Peter Crosby, OVH Board Member - Member Responsible for Complaints
Complaint Escalation
You Said:
I am not happy that I have had to escalate my complaint in order to get a resolution.
We Did!
End-to-End Reviews: We are monitoring satisfaction and escalations via 'End-to-End Reviews' of dissatisfied surveys and Stage 2 complaints. This helps identify improvements for Investigating Officers, enabling us to provide feedback and training to improve the customer complaints journey.
Weekly Drop-ins: Investigating Officers can raise concerns at weekly complaints drop-ins, attended by rotating Repairs and Reactive Supervisors, ensuring customer complaints are reviewed more effectively.
Customer Call Backs: If a customer is dissatisfied with complaint handling or outcome during the survey call, they can opt for a call back from the Quality and Assurance Coordinator who will follow up with any actions for the wider business (depending on the nature of the complaint), where necessary.
Customer Satisfaction
You Said:
The customer experience needs to be improved. I'm not happy with the level of communication.
We Did:
Communication: To resolve issues with appointment communication, we're investigating the implementation of a no-reply email service for repair appointments, ensuring customers receive timely and preferred communication.
Customer Experience Officer: Our contractors, Sovini Property Services, have recruited a Customer Experience Officer, as part of their continuous improvement, to focus on lessons learnt from complaints and surveys completed via Localz, they will create actions and provide feedback where required.
Ongoing Improvements
You Said:
How can I be sure One Vision Housing are going to learn from my experience?
We Did!
Business Transformation Meetings: We're now using 'Business Transformation' meetings to replace several older meetings. This makes it easier to discuss and fix problems that impact more than one team, and to ensure everyone is up to date with policy changes.
Improved Collaboration: To improve complaint handling, a collaborative channel monitors ongoing issues and lessons learnt from closed cases, with direct task assignment to ensure swift action.
Complaint Working Groups: To address customer dissatisfaction, monthly complaint working groups analyse recurring issues and implement service improvement strategies.
Quality and Assurance: The Quality and Assurance Co-ordinator holds a weekly meeting with our contractor to identify common trends, so that improvement actions can be created.
In addition, to improve complaint resolution speed and quality, we've implemented a trial whereby information must be provided within three working days, the Investigating Officer resolves within eight, and the Quality & Assurance Coordinator reviews the outcome letter before it's sent to the customer.
Monthly Training: Monthly mandatory training is being implemented for all investigating officers with a new hot topic discussed each month.
Check-in Meetings: 'Check-in’ meetings are in place with OVH's Investment Team to ensure any orders and recommendations from the Housing Ombudsman are being completed.
Quality of Work
You Said:
I'm unhappy with the quality of work being carried out as a result of my complaint.
We Did!
Post-Repair Inspections: For repairs resulting from complaints, Surveyors now perform post-repair inspections to guarantee work quality and proactively address potential follow-on work with customers.
Ongoing Monitoring: To address incomplete post-complaint work, a dedicated scheduler now manages these jobs, which are collated for easy access.
Complaints Data
Looking Ahead
HouseMark Assurance: HouseMark is the leading data and insight company for the UK housing sector, jointly owned by the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing, providing a range of services to help social housing providers improve performance, efficiency, and value for money. In an aim to improve accountability and transparency, we are currently undertaking an assurance exercise through HouseMark which is looking at how we collect data through our customer surveys. This audit will look at the effectiveness of our data collection processes, ensuring we produce representative and reliable results, which are then used to inform service improvements and regulatory compliance.
Proactive Complaints Approach: At OVH we value enterprise and endeavour to never stand still. As such, we are working on a proactive approach to complaints handling by utilising past complaint data and other information to spot patterns and predict potential problem areas. Instead of just reacting to complaints, we want to fix fundamental problems early on. By identifying emerging trends, we can take action before issues escalate, leading to a better experience for our customers.
Complaint and Communication Improvement Plan - We are currently working on solutions to improve the way we record, respond and report on complaints with the introduction of a Complaint and Communication Improvement Plan. By using Improvement Plans, we aim to ensure a more structured and consistent approach to our Complaint Handling Process which will help to not only resolve complaints effectively, but also identify opportunities to improve our services.
Join our Complaints Panel!
We're looking for dedicated individuals to join our Complaints Panel and help us improve our services. As a Complaint Auditor, you'll play a vital role in reviewing customer complaints to help us improve our service offer. This is a fantastic opportunity to make a real difference in how we implement feedback and enhance our customer experience.