Get involved

Get involved

Rent statement consultation

During December, we contacted over 6,000 customers to ask how you currently access information about your rent account, how you like to receive your rent statements, and how often you want them.

We’re really grateful to the more than 1,300 customers who shared their thoughts - thank you!

To make sure we‘re providing value for money, we wanted to understand if you’re happy to view your rent statements online or whether you still wish to receive a paper copy twice a year.

69% of customers said they would be happy to access their rent statement online through MyHome. Customers who said they still need a paper copy told us it was for reasons such as being visually impaired, claiming benefits or for relatives acting on their behalf.

Because of your feedback, we’re now pleased to offer you an ‘opt in’ option. This will enable customers who still want a paper copy of their rent statement to continue receiving them.

To make sure you get your statement in a way that suits you, we’ll be contacting you in April asking you to ‘opt in’ if you want to continue receiving a paper copy rent statement. Watch out for our SMS message or email.

Those customers who have already told us they want a paper copy rent statement as part of the consultation will automatically be opted in.

As a reminder, this year’s annual rent/service charge review letters will be coming out at the end of February - you’ll continue to receive paper copies of these every year, in line with our regulatory responsibilities.

Get involved

Helping us improve our services

Stonewater’s second Institute of Customer Service (ICS) survey in December told us what you think about how we work together.

Here’s how you rated us and what’s happening to make things better…

December 2020 was the end of a long, difficult year for all of us. So we’re grateful that 640 of you took the time to do the ICS survey that went out. As promised, we’ve donated £1 for every completed survey to the charity, Standing Together Against Domestic Violence.

Before we get to the results, here’s how the survey works. Stonewater was rated by you on five areas. These are:

  • Complaints/problem solving
  • Your experience when you deal with us, how much you think we care about you and put you first (our “customer ethos”)
  • Our emotional connection (do you find us trustworthy and reassuring)
  • Our ethics, by which we mean are we honest and open and do the right thing?

The results

Despite the pandemic affecting every area of our lives for the past year, overall you scored us a bit higher. Stonewater’s 2020 score was 65.3, up from 60.5 in 2019. And while that’s good, it’s not the full story.

We’re proud that in these difficult times, you find us helpful, professional and easy to deal with. But too often, you also reported that resolving problems and the speed of service just wasn’t up to scratch.

So we’ve invested in online services and changed how we operate. Find out more about that here in our delivering essential services section of our newsletter. Our estate services and repairs aren’t where you’d like them to be either, so we’re working with our contractor partners to improve this.

You also told us that our communications could be better. One way we can respond quicker is if you use ‘Rant and Rave’ to rate our services as you use them. It’s interactive, so we know much quicker if something is going wrong and can fix it. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve also worked hard to keep customers up to date, introducing this Here To Help newsletter, and we’ll continue to build on this.

What's next?

We always aim to put customers at the heart of what we do. When things go wrong, we’re not only working towards fixing them quicker and communicating better but also making sure we’re listening to you and learning how to stop problems happening in the first place.

If you’d like to help us build on the changes we’re making, why not get involved?

We’ve made some great improvements based on customer views and ideas, and realise we need to get better at shouting about this, hopefully encouraging more customers to get involved and work with us to make things better for everyone.

You can also help us by checking if we hold your up-to-date email and mobile phone numbers – you can update these quickly and easily in MyHome. And while we can’t meet in person, we can still get together virtually on Facebook or our Customer hubb.

Get involved

Your feedback counts

Your views and ideas are essential to help us shape the services we provide.

We’re constantly monitoring our repairs service and, as part of this, we’re currently reviewing our responsive repairs policy, looking at things like the ways we keep you updated on repairs and how often we contact you.

To make sure we’re providing the best possible service we can, we look at all the feedback we receive from customers from surveys, emails and messages on our social media channels.

We’re using all of this information to feed in to our repairs policy, so thank you to everyone who has shared their views so far. Don’t forget, you can tell us what you think about any of our services via our website – we’d love to hear from you!

You might have seen in the last issue of Here To Help that we’re working with the University of Stirling on an exciting project called INVITE to help us develop our capacity to support customers with dementia to live independently in their own homes for longer.

The study runs until spring 2021 and is funded by the Longleigh Foundation. It will research how we can use assistive and everyday technology to enhance the lives of customers with dementia in our retirement living schemes.

We recently held the first meeting of our advisory group, where four customers and family members joined us to share their experiences of supporting loved ones with dementia. It was fantastic – and very moving – to hear their stories, which will be invaluable in helping us to steer the project. A huge thank you to everyone who took part.

We’ll be updating you on our progress, so keep an eye out for more information coming soon.

Get involved

Update: supporting customers with dementia

Get involved

Calling all green-fingered customers!

A suggestion from one of our customers last year planted a small seed, which grew into our first ever Stonewater garden competition.

It ran from May to July and we received over 40 entries from all across the country. There were fabulous flowerbeds, splendid sunflowers, along with dazzlingly designed communal and individual gardens - like Sally from Bedford's entry pictured, which won best garden!

Building on the success of last year, we’re casting our nets wider this time and, alongside the garden entries, we’ll also be encouraging you to share what you love about where you live.

So whether you’re near an urban utopia, a rural retreat, or even a riverbank we would love to hear from you! You can check our Customer hubb for updates and competition information.

For those of you that don’t know me let me introduce myself, I’m Sue Shirt, Executive Director for Customer Experience.

I recently created a series of short videos, which focused on:

  • How we can best involve you, our customers, in helping us to design services
  • How involved you want to be in helping to design the services we deliver
  • How we can best engage with smaller groups of customers
  • And finally, how can we best communicate with you?

These videos have been shared on our Customer hubb using VideoAsk. This new software gives you a chance to share your feedback with us by sharing either a video, audio message or text. We love seeing your feedback in any format, but it is especially good to be able to see customers’ faces now that we are all living through another lockdown.

Some of the things you’ve told us so far include: you like the ease of talking to us digitally; some think local workshops or surgeries are a good idea (restrictions permitting); and some of you like surveys. So, moving forward I think we can all agree that our approach in offering many different ways for you to share your opinions with us is the right thing to do!

The videos are still on the hubb and if you want to take a moment to share your thoughts with us then please take a look here. I know that by listening to you we can deliver services that work for you.

Get involved

VideoAsks

Get involved

Great Stonewater bake off!

Many of us have taken up baking as a hobby to keep busy during the pandemic but at Stonewater, we have a culinary celebrity in our midst!

Our very own Linda from our Retirement Living team featured on last year’s Great British Bake Off and she’s now sharing her scone-making skills with our customers.

We’ll be hosting a live Zoom session on Friday 26 February at 6pm where you can cook along with Linda and make some lovely drop scones (and not a soggy bottom in sight!). You can even be in with a chance of winning a copy of the Great British Bake Off book ‘Love to Bake’, signed by Linda.

Registration for the event closes on 23 February at 5pm so head over to our Customer hubb for more details and to sign up. We hope to see you there!

Thank you for taking the time to read this edition of Here to Help.

We’re continuing to work really hard to avoid service disruption. If colleague and contractor resource levels are affected, we’ll prioritise services to minimise the impact to health, safety and well-being of all. We know this is a challenging time and we appreciate your understanding.

Stonewater is still ‘open’ however the majority of our colleagues are now working from home. You can still contact us using our main telephone number 01202 319 119, or customers can self-serve via our MyHome portal.