latest HACT report identifies how to improve resident satisfaction

The Housing Associations Charitable Trust (HACT) has undertaken a major review of surveys conducted amongst housing association tenants. This involved more than 8,000 residents providing their opinions about the nature of the relationship they had with their housing providers.

The report, entitled Rethinking customer insight, has been undertaken with the backing of Peabody, Equity Housing Group, Catalyst, One Manchester, Bpha, Settle and Trafford Housing Trust.
Key areas which were found to determine customer satisfaction were repairs, communication, trust and value for money.

The level of service relating in particular to repairs was found to influence whether customers were satisfied with the trust and communication from their provider. The findings also found that improvements in communication, including transparency, will build trust.

When questioned on how associations can improve services, 35% of participant responses mentioned repairs, 30% communication and 14% called for housing associations to be more proactive.

Alertacall’s Housing Proactive service directly helps housing providers manage their properties and can materially improve performance in each of these three key areas:

1. Repairs performance – the OKEachDay devices have repairs hotline buttons programmed to put the customer directly in contact with maintenance teams, or enable the resident to report maintenance issues via the contact centre. This makes it easier for residents to report repairs as and when they arise.
2. Communication – we provide daily contact! Housing Providers use our service to keep residents better informed. Messages can be sent to all residents using the service or tailored to individual schemes and individuals. These can be routine messages, such as for repairs and maintenance, meetings, staff changes, and so on. Additionally, the messaging function can be used for more urgent notifications, such as power cuts, warnings of icy conditions, or even for social prescribing messages.
3. Proactivity – the daily contact from Housing Proactive enables us to detect residents’ changing needs for housing providers. This can relate to predicting those who are developing higher or more complex needs and may need additional home aids or assistive technology. Furthermore, residents get more contact as and when they need it. For example, those developing dementia will have more human contact to assist them with enquiries. As a secondary function, those who are lonely and becoming more socially isolated will also receive more interaction with our friendly team if they so wish.

Housing Proactive is seen as a substantial service improvement for residents – of those surveyed, 95% of people have said they would recommend the service. Furthermore, Housing Proactive is eligible for housing benefit funding and can be provided at little or zero additional cost for residents.

If you are an existing Housing Proactive client, we can tell you much more about how to make the most of the service. We are also able to help conduct resident satisfaction surveys on your behalf.

For more information on how your organisation could benefit from our range of housing management features, email contact@alertacall.com or call Benjamin Lambert, Head of Client Relations, on 0808 208 1234.