Sutherland, as a member of the Genesis Housing Group, is committed
to keeping its reputation for providing responsive services to its
customers and for that reputation to grow.
One of the major ways we are doing this is through
delivering service excellence. What does
delivering service excellence mean? Put simply, to us it means that
we are fully committed to providing top quality services to our
customers. We want our services to continuously improve so that
they remain customer-focused and provide value-for-money. Our goals
are to have high levels of customer satisfaction and to be one of
the best performers when compared to other housing groups.
We are doing this in a number of different ways:
• Through consultation with our customers and
acting on feedback. This could be through surveys or focus groups
that we've carried out, through meetings or conferences with
customers and elected representatives or through feedback from
looking at complaints that have been made.
• By making sure that our business plans have
improving our services at their heart.
• We have service improvement plans which set out
how we can improve each service. These are long-term plans which
customers are involved in agreeing.
• A programme of service improvement reviews,
which look at one service in particular (for example, anti-social
behaviour) and make recommendations on improving the service.
Consultation with customers plays a large part here too.
• Our service commitment, which sets out standards
of customer care that you can expect when you contact us. These
standards were set with customers and are regularly monitored by
mystery shoppers (people who pretend to be our customers) who check
to see that we are meeting the standards. For more information
about our service commitment and mystery shopping, please
click here
• We benchmark how well we're doing with other
housing organisations by comparing our services with theirs.
• Through achieving customer service standards, such as
Charter Mark, which is a sign of having reached a
high level in customer service delivery, offering choice to
customers and promoting continuous improvement (www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/chartermark).
Genesis Housing Group is regulated by the Housing Corporation and
the services that we provide will be inspected regularly. We hope
to be inspected in 2006, and the Audit Commission
will tell us how effectively we are providing services and will
rate our prospects for improvement.
If you have any comments or suggestions you would like to make
about our programme for delivering service excellence please
contact the Genesis Housing Group Policy and Communications Team on
020 8150 4112 or e-mail info@ghg.org.uk.