Swindon Council is changing the way that it measures tenant satisfaction in relation to maintenance and renewal of its housing stock. They will soon be introducing a system whereby tenants can comment on a job by typing directly onto a hand-held device that council staff have. If you don’t want to use this method – you might be reluctant to put down comments which are critical of the staff member – you can ask for a paper form, or you can send in your comments online.
The online forms can be found at https://www.voiceyourviews.co.uk/satisfaction-surveys
You will see a button for repairs and for various other works. You can go to the repairs form here:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/HsgRepairs
Tenants are sometimes skeptical about the usefulness of sending in comments. However, it’s important that tenants do comment on how good or bad the service was for a particular job. It’s our rent which pays for the service and we should be treated with respect by the people doing the work and expect a good quality of work.
Tenants reps are involved in regular meetings with council officers and discuss the feedback. The more that is received then the easier it is for us to see trends and patterns and to try to improve the service provided. Where we have evidence of problems we raise these with the council officers.
We would be interested to hear about your experience, good or bad, to help us in our efforts to improve the service we receive.
Swindon Tenants Campaign Group 
The problem with these “customer” feedback processes is that it is usually the work of the individual worker(s) and front line staff which is being commented on rather than systems, adequacy of resources or practices of the companies being contracted to do the work. Anyone think of a way round this?
LikeLike
That’s true Ellen. However, in Swindon we find that the biggest problem we come across is the absence of a tight control on contractors. This is one of the issues we have taken up. The problem is that we don’t get a lot of feedback from tenants compared with the size of the stock, 10,000 properties. The more info we get from tenants then we can challenge system and management issues.
LikeLike