Our Customer Hub turns four
On 2nd November the Customer Enabling Hub will celebrate its fourth anniversary. The last four years have flown by and during that time we have listened to feedback from customers and staff and evolved our service to be more responsive to our customer’s needs.
We are incredibly proud of the way we responded when COVID hit. We moved to home working overnight without dropping a single minute of service for our customers.
Just before the first lockdown we recruited additional staff to help us improve our service. We now have 23 advisors working a mixture of full time and part time, with three team leaders and a manager. These additional staff have helped us to significantly reduce our call waiting times and make sure that we are delivering a better service.
We also changed the way in which we worked last year, to make sure that we can respond quickly when calls come in. We can have no calls one minute and five the next - the team leaders monitor this and make sure that our hub advisors pause what they are doing and jump on to take these calls as soon as they can to maintain a good service.
Every day the Hub deals with an average of 195 calls and 240 online contacts from our customers, and 80% of these are dealt with entirely in the Hub, with 20% passed on to our colleagues in other teams, such as Housing and Property, to follow up.
Alongside this we make around 600 outgoing calls each month to customers to help with areas such as:
- managing arrears
- open and log all post received for the business
- print and send all letters for the business
- complete various admin tasks for our colleagues in other teams
The Hub advisors are real specialists who have been fully trained to manage:
- Diagnosing and booking any repairs needed - home or communal areas
- Any surveyor inspections that need to be booked for more complex problems
- Liaising with our contractors if additional works are needed
- Raising minor adaptations to your home if you need them and advising you of the process for larger adaptations
- Taking information about any damp or mould problems in your home, to make sure that we have all the information needed to pass to our surveyors and ensure that this gets dealt with quickly
- Deal with any queries about your rent and provide advice where needed
- Talk to you about your arrears and help you set up affordable payment plans to clear these when needed
- Take rent payments, either by phone, online or by setting up a direct debit
- Provide advice about universal credit and verify your housing information when this comes through to ensure your claim goes through smoothly
- Help you to set up your MyAccount and answer any queries you may have
- Help you to find information on the website
- Help victims of domestic abuse and ensure that support is in place to keep you safe
- Provide advice on moving home, whether through the Home Choice system or mutual exchange
- Approve your applications for Homeswapper or advise why we are unable to
- Take notice if you want to leave your property and ensure that all the information is taken and passed to our lettings team
- Give advice about ASB or other neighbour nuisance
- Advise about parking and other estate issues
- Advise on any tenancy issues
- Liaise with our housing officers about any tenancy, nuisance or estate issues if needed
- Raise formal complaints if things have not gone well
- Deal with around 80% of all compensation requests when you need to claim
So, in short, we are here to help you. We are working hard to provide the best service we can, and we will continue to listen to your feedback and evolve. Please get in touch and let us know if we can improve in any areas or what you think we are doing well.