Customer

We will:

• Review our service offer to customers using their feedback about what they value and need from our services. We will ensure that the roles, responsibilities and structures across Paradigm support the service offer. This includes repairs, how we manage new homes, the standard we let existing homes and how we manage and communicate about service charges
• Develop and roll out new Customer Care Standards, based on what customers have told us they want the service to feel like. The Standards set out how we will deliver services and how we will respond to customer needs and preferences
• Use customer insight from surveys and other methods to understand their experience of our services and identify where we need to continuously improve. We will increase the areas and ways we seek feedback, including after customers have reported anti-social behaviour, had a repair carried out and moved home
• Continue to improve how we tell customers about the actions and improvements we have made in response to their feedback, including through our website, customer portal and newsletters
• Develop our customer engagement approach, to ensure that customers have a range of ways including digital and online opportunities, as well as face-to-face, to be involved in the scrutiny and co-design of services. This also includes shaping their local service offer and improvements.

We will support our customers to manage their tenancies and minimise the times when tenancies fail by introducing a clear customer support offer, which will:

• Ensure how we work across all services proactively identifying when customers need our support and provide or sign-post to the right place. This is throughout a customer’s journey with us, from pre-tenancy to end-of- tenancy
• Develop new partnerships and build on existing partnerships with other organisations to support customers and work together with partners to access greater support and funding to benefit customers. For example Citizens Advice or social services
• Provide some housing related support services directly, including welfare benefit advice and early tenancy support.

We will provide a proactive and preventative Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) service to Paradigm customers and neighbourhoods, focused on early intervention and reduction. The service will be focused on the needs of customers, working to provide  joined up, customer-centred case management. The service will take responsible enforcement, while always dealing with victims and perpetrators of ASB with empathy and respect.

Over the next three years, our transformation programme will support us to offer customers greater choice in how they contact us or access services including to self-serve where they choose to. Customers will be able to use a range of channels including online digital, telephone and face-to-face. In the short term, we will identify improvements to existing customer contact management.

At March 2023, there has been strong progress in delivering the action plan to support this strategy over the first two years, meeting key milestones for:

• Sustaining tenancies and for ending the use of fixed term tenancies
• Reviewing our grant giving activity, and
• Strengthening our work on safeguarding and domestic violence.