WORKING WITH YOU

In this section we look at the Tenant Involvement and Empowerment standard and how we deliver services that meet your needs, as well as how we involve you in our decision making, so your voice makes a real difference.

North Star LINK

North Star LINK is your group of involved tenants who work closely with staff across the organisation, influencing and improving services for all customers. The group involves tenants from both Endeavour and Teesdale who meet regularly to represent the views of all our customers, residents, and local communities. The group’s activities range from helping us to develop the tenants’ magazine and report, to working with contractors to improve kitchen and bathroom specifications. North Star LINK organised the very successful tenants’ conference in 2013, and this year’s conference at the Riverside Stadium, was even bigger and better than ever.

Tenants’ Voice Scrutiny Panel

North Star Tenants’ Voice Scrutiny Panel forms an important part of our approach to working with you – putting customers at the heart of our business and giving them access to review any service and hold us to account. The Panel, supported independently by the Tenant Panel Advisory Service (TPAS), selects areas of service they would like to review and scrutinises how well we are doing, making recommendations for improvements directly to our Board. Their work has made a real difference to the services we delivered this year, including the decision to invest over £150,000 in our new Customer Service Team, which was launched in March 2014. The Panel has also been recruiting and training new members to help further strengthen our services.

Quick Change

We have always regarded ourselves as being good at listening to customers and acting on their feedback. Over the last 12 months we have focussed on speeding up the process for bringing about change from your feedback. Our approach to Quick Change has taken lessons from the private sector and reshaped the way we now listen, learn from and deliver improvements for customers within days, rather than weeks or months, using a much wider range of ‘real time’ customer feedback.

YOU SAID, WE DID

We value your feedback and will work hard to make improvement wherever we can.

Here are just a few examples of how your voice has helped to make a difference in 2013/14:

As a customer you wanted to be ‘kept close’ and provided with an excellent response with ideally a human voice at the end of the phone.

We implemented a Customer Service Team which answers every call with a human voice – no voice mail recordings. The customer will remain the focus of the call, and we aim to resolve all your issues at first point of contact.

You told us that our Customer Services should cover multiple services within the business, and should operate one service across Teesdale and Endeavour areas.

The team now operates across Endeavour and Teesdale. Following our repairs and satisfaction surveys, we have carried out a 6 month service review, which has highlighted further training areas to enable the team to provide a slicker service in repairs and surveys. Once these developments have been made we aim to continue to work towards providing a ‘one stop shop’ for customers.

Supported Housing Tenants asked to be more involved in things that matter to them, such as choosing blinds for their flats.

We have started consulting with Tenants on more of our improvement works, and have already started replacing the vertical blinds with new roller blinds.

Parkfield Hall Tenants wanted to learn more about the garden project and grow their own vegetables and fruit.

We set up the gardening club on a weekend Support Workers supported and educated service users on growing crops. We also had a sunflower competition, which encouraged others to get involved.

Young Tenants in our supported housing schemes told us they struggle to get to appointments.

With the help of a former Tenant, we raised funds and have been able to provide three brand new bikes to help service users get out and about.