17 October 2006

A STATEMENT OF PROMISES FROM US TO YOU

The Charter sets out the service standards we will be aiming to meet whenever you contact us. This Charter has been developed following a comprehensive consultation with our customers and staff. We carried out a survey of new and existing customers to find out their views of customer service. We then met with a group of tenants to discuss the survey results, and to ensure that the Charter takes into account the areas of customer service that are most important to you.

Our Customer Contact Charter has been published here for the first time and we are working towards the targets on response times that it contains. We will also be producing a leaflet, so that all our customers are aware of the level of service that they can expect to receive from us.

How will you know if we are meeting the standards in the Charter?

This is a new Charter and so it will mean some new ways of working for us. Over the next few months, we will be putting systems in place to help staff work towards the standards and measure how well we are doing against them. We will involve our customers in measuring our success, through their day-to-day contact with us and by carrying out mystery shopping exercises. We will publish the results of this monitoring in future issues of Talk and in our annual review.

Monitoring the standards?

We are introducing the Charter to help us get better at customer service and so we have set challenging targets. We are confident we can achieve them in time and we want to know what you think of how we are doing. We will be reviewing the standards in 6 months time and we will be asking customers for their views as part of the review.

In the meantime, if you think that we have failed to meet any of our standards, please let us know. We aim to offer a high level of customer service, but occasionally things can go wrong. If this does happen, we would prefer to know about it so that we can help put things right.

Please report any issues to a member of staff who will listen to you and make every effort to sort out the problem to your satisfaction. However, if you feel that we have not resolved the issue you should make a formal complaint.

What we expect of our customers:

We believe in Mutual Respect. We understand that sometimes you may feel angry or frustrated. We will always listen to you and try to help. However if you are abusive, threatening or rude to any of our staff we will ask you to leave, or end our conversation or meeting with you, until you have calmed down.

Click here to view our key Promises.