Material property, Font

Your feedback is always so important to ensure we can deliver the services you need. In this section, you can hear from Neil Kane, our head of customer voice, who shares more on how your thoughts and feedback has helped us over the past year.

Our work to place the customer at the heart of everything we do has recently been recognised by Tpas, England’s leading tenant engagement experts. The Tpas accreditation shows our commitment to engaging and involving customers. We needed 80% to pass the assessment and achieved a high average score of 90%, and we're following some recommendations Tpas made about our Customer Voice service; for example, by making our complaints performance more widely available. We’re one of just 17 landlords to be supported by Tpas (as of March 2023).

Flash photography, Audio equipment, Face, Hearing, Eyelash, Eyewear
Rectangle, Violet

Your

feedback

Chair, Leisure

We’re always looking to welcome new members to our involved customer groups. The more customers who are involved from across the Group, the more your voice can be heard – and ultimately the more positive change we can make on the issues that matter most to you. We’re especially aware we’ve rapidly grown in the past few years with East Boro Housing Trust (EBHT), Central and Cecil (C&C) and Enham Trust joining, and we would particularly welcome more customers from these organisations to become involved.

Joining a group is easy – you can do so, or find out more information, by contacting customervoice@aster.co.uk or call us on 0333 400 8222.

View from a customer

Steve

Aster customer, Hampshire

To read about our customer satisfaction figures and complaints received during 2022/23 please click here.

Acting on what you tell us

Nearly 100 customer and policy consultations were held during the year (see below for those related to customer services), and we heard from over 7,000 customers, nearly twice as many as the previous year.

Here’s just some of the ways your views have influenced both the services we provide and the policy decisions we’ve taken:

we’re developing ‘How to’ videos. These are quick guides for carrying out simple maintenance around your home. Customers chose the video topics from a long list, while suggesting other topics they’d like to know more about. These include resetting and repressurising gas boilers, bleeding radiators, and dealing with mould at home

we’ve introduced parking management schemes in areas where customers hadn’t been able to park close to their homes due to non-residents parking in estates

before publishing last year’s customer annual report, we asked what you wanted the report to contain and how you’d like to see information presented. We listened to your thoughts and have made further improvements, based on your feedback via a survey, in this year’s report. 73% of visitors to last year’s report were satisfied with it.

We held five customer service policy consultations during the year. Some of the changes made as a direct result of customer feedback include:

Repairs and maintenance policy: we’ve made expectations and repair timescales clearer, and we’ll communicate with customers and offer convenient appointments.

Damp, mould and condensation policy: we’ve removed the recommendation that customers get contents insurance (though we'd still suggest you do this). Each home will be surveyed once every five years.

We’ve also amended the policy to make it clearer how long it’ll usually take between a problem being reported and action being taken.

Leasehold and freehold management policy: there will be a dedicated team member who can help with questions about to any ‘major’ works – these are usually large ‘one-off’ projects designed to extend and improve the life of your home. The team member will also support where charges may be passed back to customers as a result of these works.

Giving you a greater voice

We’re committed to ensuring you have the opportunity to have a direct voice, work with us to give us feedback, review our services, and help us understand what your main priorities are.

One way in which you can do this is by joining one of our ‘involved customer’ groups, which allow us to hear from you and make positive change to our services. Over 100 of you have done so over the past year, bringing the total number of customers in these groups to 1,620.

These include:

During the year, we were pleased to welcome members from our involved customer groups to our annual customer away day. We were also joined by some of our new Enham Trust customers, as we celebrated the great work of our groups throughout the year. We discussed our ‘ageing well’ approach along with investment into our homes. Jenny Osbourne, chief executive of Tpas, attended and presented us with our new accreditation certificate.