Listening to you

Customer voice is another way we can connect with you
to understand first-hand how we can improve our customer services and your experience. It remains at the heart of our services and provides assurances that we are checking and focusing our efforts in the right places. We have a strong track record of empowering our customers.

During the year we held 72 customer and policy consultations, attracting over 4,400 customer responses. This feedback led to us changing, withdrawing or introducing 20 customer services, including extensive work developing Resident Engagement Strategies in tall buildings, customer services policy reviews and local neighbourhood consultations. 

We also conduct our own regular customer satisfaction surveys. Listening to the thoughts, suggestions and opinions from our customers about how we deliver our services is vital and really does make a difference when we consider how and what we need to improve.  

In 2023 / 2024: 

• 84% of our customers are satisfied that Aster treats them fairly and with respect 
• 76% are satisfied that Aster provides a home that is
  well maintained 
• 81% are satisfied overall with the repairs we completed  
• 77% are satisfied with the overall service we provide 
• 99 new customers joined our consultation groups 
• We now have more than 1,600 involved customers
  and rising. 

Last year we were delighted to achieve accreditation with Tpas, the tenant
engagement experts, and our work continues to build on that success.

Building Safety Act

As a requirement of the Building Safety Act, we completed
a series of activity to find out about how customers living in seven storey / 18-metre-tall buildings or higher wanted us to communicate with them on building safety matters. 

We sent out more than 3,500 surveys to customers living in blocks of flats and independent living schemes and received 803 responses 

74% of customers are confident they know what to do
in event of a fire 

94% of customers would report a safety incident in their building to Aster 

44% of customers would like building safety information via the website and MyAster online portal 

We then used this feedback to start our engagement
with our customers in tall buildings, and sent surveys to all
670 homes in our high-rise buildings, and followed these
up with in person meetings in each of the four schemes 

We created an Easy Read version of the building safety information and these were delivered to each of the 670 residents and we included “Recite Me” (translation and audio) function for the website, where the building safety information can be found. 

Grounds maintenance survey

Customer survey to find out how customers thought these services perform: 

1,200 customer responses which the team followed up with any customer who raised a query to address these 

Signposted customers to local authorities where land / works not owned / managed by Aster  

Updated grounds maintenance maps to complete works needed 

Flagged queries relating to other teams for faster management. 

Local neighbourhood consultations

In 2023/24 we held 18 local neighbourhood consultations.  Some examples included:  

Asking customers if parking restrictions should be added
in their community to ensure only residents and their visitors can park there 

Whether we should install CCTV systems in communal areas to prevent crime to offer security reassurance for residents. 

Damp, condensation and mould (DCM) 

We proactively sent 1,337 surveys to customers with
previous DCM issues.

503 responses identified repeat issues picked up by
our specialist repairs team.  

Scheme refurbishments 

Surveys sent out to customers following their scheme refurbishment to find out if this has improved their communal living experiences across four schemes. 

96% of customers are satisfied with the refurbishments 

Feedback included “I’m very happy and will use the area much."

MyAster and use of other online services

We sent out a survey to customers who have not yet registered on MyAster to understand if they used the digital services of any other of their service providers. From the feedback we learnt that around two-thirds
do, and as a result we will:  

Explain our online MyAster self-service options more clearly 

We’re planning further customer research
to understand how we can improve the MyAster customer experience so more customers will use it. 

New homes defects survey

To find out how we can improve the process of customers reporting and resolving defects in new homes, feedback has helped us to develop a series of new checks. 

Complaints feedback

We contacted customers who had recently been through the complaints process.  As a result, some improvements were put in place:   

New complaints training for all complaints
handling colleagues 

New customer relationship management system
for clearer reporting 

Action framework, learning from complaints to
prevent recurrences. 

Customer voice newsletter 

We created a dedicated customer voice newsletter to share some of the work customers are involved with and to encourage more customers to get involved. 

More ways we’ve refreshed listening to your voice this year: 

Creating positive change to improve our services with your feedback  

Moved towards a culture of discussion and challenge, with respect and safety 

Representation of and listening to customers from all our local regions and sharing customer feedback to inform every level of our business.

Policy consultations 

Our policy consultations with customers this
year included: 

Anti-social Behaviour Policy 

Complaints Policy 

Compensation Policy 

Recharge Policy 

Customer Voice Policy. 

As a result of customer feedback, some changes made to these policies included: 

Simplified language to plain English for shorter and clearer read 

Adding a step-by-step timeline to website to
guide customers. 

Earlier this year, The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) launched their new approach to consumer regulation. This more proactive approach to regulating the sector is underpinned by making sure those living in social housing have homes that are safe and of a decent standard, and they receive quality services from their landlords.  

There are several tools the RSH have created to set the expectations of social housing landlords, including a way of monitoring landlord performance in the services they deliver. 

To set expectations there are now four newly revised consumer standards for social housing landlords to ensure their services meet. These are:  

The consumer standards clearly set out the expectations and requirements of social housing providers when delivering their services and you can find out more
about each of these by clicking on the individual
standards above. 

Alongside the consumer standards the RSH also created
a set of measures which all registered landlords of social housing are required to complete on an annual basis.

These are called the Tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) and are a new way of using data we hold about our services, alongside actively engaging with both customers who rent a home from us, and those who are shared owners, to understand how well we are delivering essential customer services.

There are twenty two TSMs in total, including: 

Twelve customer satisfaction measures  

Ten business performance measures  

The purpose of the TSMs is to provide customers living in social housing access to information on how well their landlord is performing across several key service areas.

The RSH have themed the service areas in the follow way: 

Overall satisfaction 

Keeping properties in good repair 

Maintaining building safety 

Respectful and helpful engagement 

Effective handling of complaints 

Responsible neighbourhood management 

Each theme contains a set of either customer satisfaction or business performance measures, or a combination
of the two. 

Over the course of the year, we have been preparing our satisfaction and business data, all of which was submitted to the RSH in-line with the requirements as set out in the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard.  

We’d like to thank all of you who provided feedback as part of our work to gather the TSM satisfaction data. Over 2,200 rental customers and more than 500 shared owners took part in this year’s TSM activities.  

If you’d like to find out more about the TSMs or how we
work with the independent research company,
CX feedback, contact us or visit our website.