Customer Contact Manager, Alison Rodgie, tells us about how her team can help

The Customer Contact Team (CCT) is your first point of contact and can deal with a wide range of enquiries and advice. When you call or email us we will either deal with your enquiry, or ensure that it reaches the right person.

What does the CCT deal with?

We log initial repairs and if we can – offer you an appointment for the repair, follow up on in-progress repairs, or change your appointment.
We take rent and service charge payments and let you know the balance of your account; we can also send you statements and advise you on ways to pay.
We log initial reports of antisocial behaviour or other issues in your neighbourhood and can give you advice about who to contact if it is not something that Barnet Homes can deal with.
• We can help you find someone to speak with if you are having financial problems or need help with completing a Universal Credit application.
• We take requests to make changes to your tenancy or your lease.

How do I contact the CCT?

Barnet Homes customers can call 020 80 80 6587 or use the Contact Us form on our website barnethomes.org/contact

If you’re an Opendoor Homes customer, you can call 020 8080 6586 or use the Contact Us form on our website opendoorhomes.org.
How quickly will I receive assistance?

Our average wait time for a call to be answered is around three minutes. We are most busy on Mondays and particularly in the morning and so if you’re not calling for something important and don’t want to hold – please try calling us later in the day.

When we speak to you or email you back, we will let you know when you can expect your enquiry to be dealt with.

Why can’t I speak to my Housing Officer?

If the CCT cannot resolve your enquiry straight away, we will send your enquiry to the right person to do so. We use a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) to do this. That way we can log and track customer enquiries to make sure that they are being dealt with by the right person, within the right time-frames.

Your Neighbourhood Housing Officer is not always the right person to speak to. For example, they do not deal with your rent or service charge account or repair issues. The Customer Contact Team can deal with these things and so you will get assistance more quickly by contacting us first.

How well is the CCT performing?

So far this year we have:

  • Answered 90% of the 66,441 calls that we have received
  • Responded to emails within an average of 2 working days
  • Provided an appointment to 85% of customers when they reported a repair
  • Customer feedback indicates that 94.4% of customers agree that we treated them with respect

How we are using customer survey feedback

In 2020, we introduced a new approach to customer satisfaction surveying. Instead of sending out a paper survey to customers by post every two years, we appointed an independent company called TLF to contact a sample of our tenants, non-secure tenants and leaseholders each month to complete a short telephone interview. TLF ask customers a range of satisfaction questions including satisfaction with the overall service provided, repairs and maintenance, quality of home and ease of dealing with us. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to complete a survey with TLF – we are really grateful for your feedback which we are using to improve services.

What has the survey feedback told us?

The table below shares the areas that we have identified as being most important to customers and priorities we need to focus on to improve customer experience and satisfaction.

How easy we are to deal with

  • Making it easier for customers to speak to someone and get a response to emails

How well we listen to your views & act on them

  • Making it easier for customers to get requests actioned

How well we deal with repairs & maintenance

  • Reducing how long it takes for repairs to be completed
  • Ensuring repairs are fully fixed

The value for money of service charges for leaseholders

  • Making information about service charges clearer
  • Improving visibility of services that leaseholders pay for e.g. caretaking and communal repairs
  • Explaining more clearly the reasons for major works and high cost of works during consultation

What improvements are we making?

To make it easier for customers to get what they need from us and ensure they are listened to when they make a request, our current focus is on:

  • Improving how we assist customers who email us. We have created a new team, the Customer Resolution Team within our Customer Contact service, to manage customer emails to our Talk2Us address to help make sure we give customer emails the same priority as customer calls.
  • Reducing delays for customers when their request is passed to another service. We are developing target time-frames for all common enquiries so that customers know how quickly they can expect a response or other follow up action. We are setting up supporting monitoring so that we can identify and address areas with delays.

To improve customer experience of our repairs service, our current focus is on:

  • Looking into the factors causing customers to say their repair was not fully fixed. We are taking action to address issues identified. We are also making sure that customers who tell us that their repair was not fully fixed in their post-repair survey are assisted by our Resident Liaison Officer.
  • Improving how we assist customers where there is an issue with their repair. Whilst our Repairs service continues to face nationwide resourcing and supply chain challenges we want to get better at providing proactive updates (by phone) to customers experiencing delays, moved appointments or another issue with their repair.