Understanding complaints

We always try to give great customer service, but we know there are occasions when we don’t get it quite right.

Most of our interactions with customers go well, and there are plenty of ways to ask for help. You can do this by making a service request by email, by phone, or by registering for a Connect online account and getting in touch through there. When a staff member picks up your request through one of these routes, they will log the issue, and action will be taken.

Sometimes, things don’t go so well and you may want to complain. The first stage is to tell us that you want to complain through one of our official routes which are telephone, letter, email, via the website or online platform. This will be logged as a stage one complaint. We will acknowledge it within five working days and assign your complaint to a member of our Complaints team or a service manager. They will respond to your complaint within 10 working days of acknowledging it, or we’ll discuss an extension with you if the issue’s particularly complicated.

Last year, 90% of complaints were resolved at stage one; however, if you feel your complaint hasn’t been fully resolved at this stage, you can make a request to progress the complaint to the final stage of the process, stage two.

Your complaint at stage two will also be acknowledged within five working days. The stage one result will be reviewed by a head of service or director, who will give their response within 20 working days of acknowledgement, or again, we’ll discuss an extension with you if the issue is particularly complicated.

Between April 2024 and March 2025, we received 255 formal complaints. A lot of work goes into responding to these complaints, as a result of which, our average response time is 8.5 working days, which is an improvement compared to last year.

Whilst we don’t always uphold complaints, we always try to learn from them to improve our services or the information we provide.

For example, in 2024/25 we received a lot of complaints about our gas contractor so, we applied formal terms of the contract with that contractor and agreed a formal improvement plan. While there is more work to do to meet the terms of the plan, performance has improved.

Other changes we have made as a result of complaints feedback from last year:

• We’ve added mid and post inspections to our more complex repairs to minimise incomplete or incorrect works being undertaken.
• We’ve introduced new policies, procedures and tools to better support our Community Housing Officers to proactively manage antisocial behaviour cases, especially our more serious cases.

You can find out more about our service improvements in our Complaints Annual Report.