We asked Shaleen Brown, Customer Engagement Lead, to explain how we work with engaged customers and the benefits this brings to Orbit and local communities.
“Here at Orbit, we provide a range of opportunities to ensure that customers can feedback on their experiences, scrutinise our performance, influence decisions and shape recommendations for improvement.
“Whether it’s feedback from an individual about their personal experience, a suggestion about their wider local community or working directly with our leadership team and other Orbit colleagues to influence more strategic policies and procedures, the voice of the customer can be heard throughout our organisation.
“As part of the Customer Engagement team, I work with our Engaged Customers who feedback on their experiences, review our performance, identify service improvements and hold to us to account.
“Last year, 232 new residents opted-in to receiving updates about engagement opportunities via our digital Your Voice platform, our monthly magazine and to take part in engagement activities, bringing the total number of Engaged Customers to 603.
“Your Voice enables customers to digitally engage and provide feedback, helping to shape the business and our services. Through this platform, we offer a variety of opportunities such as virtual webinars on topics that matter to you, surveys, polls, and scrutiny groups to hold us to account on the services you receive.
“Through Your Voice, we share upcoming opportunities such as Scrutiny Hackathons which allow customers to identify a problem statement that they would like to address. These virtual workshops bring together customers and colleagues from across Orbit, as well as contractors and representatives from other housing associations to explore the issue and identify improvements.
“Our first Scrutiny Hackathon looked at improvements to the annual gas servicing process. As a result of the session, 49 individual improvements were identified and we are working with our customers, our heating and electrical and communications teams, to progress these and report back. We have since carried out our second hackathon around income and collections, we look to share the improvements with you shortly.
“As well as our engaging with customers virtually, we also arrange face-to-face activities such as Scrutiny groups and annual festivals. The aim of the festival is to increase awareness of our customer engagement activities and participation from underrepresented customer groups. Our teams complete activities with customers from all tenures and cover topics ranging from building safety and the social housing white paper, to net zero carbon. As a result of these sessions, we identify different service improvements, recruit new customers to engage with us in our strategic activities, and gain valuable insight on which of our business change activities will have the largest impact on our customers.
“In the last year, engaged customers have helped us to identify 19 areas for improvement. For example, customers told us they would like to receive a suitable date and time when reporting a repair. We have now begun offering this service on the first point of contact customers have when reporting their repair.
“Like everyone else, many of our customers are facing more and more challenges in their daily lives so it’s vital that they have a voice so that we can work together to provide the support and services that they need.”
