Improving our complaints handling approach

HOMELIFE

November 2023

We’ve been working with a group of residents to improve the way we handle your complaints.

Residents registered on our involved resident database were invited to take part in reviewing a selection of complaints. Those that volunteered assessed these and commented on how well we handled the complaint, according to our complaints handling procedure and our values of inclusion, passion, people responsibility and impact.

The responses highlighted some of the good practice we had demonstrated when handling the cases, as well as areas we need to improve on.

As a result of this we’ll be making the following changes:

• When we send our stage 1 complaints decision, we are often booking repairs to put things right for some time in the future. We currently leave the complaint open on our systems, so we can check the repair took place as agreed. Residents told us that this isn’t effective as some complaint handlers don’t follow up to see if the repair has been completed. To improve this, we are looking at ways to monitor these ongoing repairs to make sure that you’re kept informed and are happy with the works when they are done
• We’re making sure all our complaint handling staff to contact residents to let them know when their complaint will be closed. This will give you a chance to query the decision, ask follow-up questions, and let us know if we’ve missed anything.

We’ve shared these actions with the residents who took part, with one saying:

‘’Thanks for this, appreciate the update. Great to see that there were some immediate actions that came from the process. Great to be involved, I'll look out for comms regarding the next session.’’

We’ll be reviewing more complaints with resident volunteers in January 2024. If you’d like to get involved in this contact us. You can also visit the Resident Involvement and Accountability webpage to find out about other involvement opportunities.