Customer Engagement Strategy 2015/ /18

1

Customer Enga

gement

Strategy

2015/16

- 2017/

18

Our Vision

To provide a great quality customer engagement service that is accessible to all our customers and offers a wide range of opportunities to work with us to scrutinise and improve our services.

Our Objectives and Targets

To achieve our vision we have set three strategic priorities and targets:

Involve residents in scrutinising our performance;

engagement is used to challenge performance and improve services

Engage with more of our customers;

embed customer engagement in our services.

Achieve value for money by using customer feedback to improve services;

feeding back to customers to show how their contributions have been implemented to improve our services

Scope of our Strategy

Guinness has a new, national, functional structure and our Customer Engagement service needs to reflect the operational needs of the business and our governance arrangements.

This strategy sets out our vision for engaging with customers in the future. We intend to retain past good practice and, continue to utilise the expertise and experience of our longstanding engaged customers. We will accommodate those customers who prefer to communicate with us in more traditional ways. However, our new approach will place greater emphasis on modern methods of engagement.

Customer engagement encompasses the range of mechanisms we employ to elicit the views and opinions of our customers to facilitate co-regulation and, the ways that we keep our customers informed of new initiatives and changes to our services. Our approach incorporates a range of methods for customers to engage with us while ensuring that involvement translates into

demonstrable service improvement. We will listen to customers and seek to facilitate their personal development.

This strategy sets out our scrutiny and customer engagement activities across Guinness. Our process for engaging with customers and resident groups to scrutinise our services will enable us to work with small groups of customers as well as the wider customer base whether we are

consulting, or gathering or disseminating information. It will also incorporate a range of time bound mechanisms including; task and finish groups, service review groups and consultation workshops

Our Strategy

Involve customers in scrutinising our performance

We will:

 Ensure our scrutiny process reflects best practice and allows customers to influence our strategic direction.

 Provide independent expert advice as appropriate to support customer led scrutiny of our services and performance.

 Offer appropriate training opportunities to customers to support the scrutiny of our services.  Provide a clear remit for customers engaged in scrutinising services and identify the

commitment required for each exercise.

 Support the scrutiny function through the provision of wide ranging performance and customer feedback data

 Promote the role of scrutiny to increase customer awareness of ways they can be involved.

 Publicise the ways that our customers have influenced and shaped our services.

Engage with more of our customer community

We will:

 Develop a dedicated area on the TGP web site tailored to customer engagement activities

 Use text messaging to gain immediate feedback on our services

 Interact and hold ‘conversations’ with our customers using applications like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter

 Establish a standing reading panel for residents who wish to work with us on an occasional basis reviewing resident documentation.

 Establish a range of time bound and functional mechanisms to support our resident engagement process including; task and finish groups, service review groups and consultation workshops.

 Undertake customer satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping exercises to inform change

Achieve value for money by using customer feedback to improve services

We will:

 Keep our customers informed to enable them to engage with us effectively.

 Use Customer Journey Mapping to understand our customers experience and, identify good practice and service weaknesses

 Feedback to customers to show how their contributions have been implemented to improve our services

Measuring Success

We will develop an action plan to set out what our strategy will deliver including key outcomes and measures of success.

We will also use a suite of key performance indicators which include;

 Number of residents who are actively engaged with us

 Measure of engagement of residents who are members of minority and hard to reach groups

 Number of Service Reviews undertaken and changes made to services as a consequence of service review recommendations.

 Number of Customer Journey Mapping Exercises undertaken and service improvements made as a consequence of resulting action plans

Managing risk

By taking our customers views into account we will mitigate the risk of failing to meet our strategic vision to, improve people’s lives, deliver a great customer experience and, increase customer satisfaction

Our customer engagement strategy will also ensure we meet our regulatory requirements by providing a wide range of opportunities for customers to influence and be involved in:

 The formulation of our housing related policies and strategic priorities.

 Making decisions about how housing related services including the setting of service standards

 Scrutinising our performance and the making of recommendations as to how performance might be improved

 Agreeing local offers for service delivery

 Ask our customers how they want to be involved with our governance arrangements Our strategic approach is designed to mitigate these risks.

We will:

 Actively promote and raise awareness of the value of customer engagement (to customers, stakeholders and employees) and develop a culture of participation so that all planning, decision-making and review processes are open to customer input.

 Ensure that minority and hard to reach groups are represented.

 Utilise internal and external data and feedback by engaging and consulting across the business

 Store and manage personal data in an appropriate manner in accordance with the Data Protection Policy.