Making every contact count

The National Housing Federation ( NHF ) has recently released a new report called 'Making Every Contact Count’. This highlights best practice and provides guidance and encouragement for every social landlord to maximise the benefit of every contact with residents.

This report sets out how social landlords of different types and sizes can use the ‘making every contact count’ approach to effectively and efficiently gather information about the condition of homes and the needs of residents. For social landlords, making every contact count means using one-off, routine and planned interactions with residents as opportunities to gather information about the condition of their homes, and their individual and or household needs.

This information can be used to proactively identify residents with maintenance or property condition issues in their homes or support needs that we may be able to help address.

Our Approach

One of the main themes of Elim’s Customer Experience strategy is that ‘every contact matters’. Here are a few ways that we are trying to improve our understanding of our customers’ needs and the service they receive from Elim:

• We use service data to identify residents who may need additional support. For example, we monitor and stay in regular contact with any households who have a capped off gas supply. We do not look at this as an isolated technical or health and safety issue, but recognise that it can identify a need for additional tenancy support, or a sign of fuel poverty.
• We are continuing to develop our digital self-service offer. This has taken us far longer than we hoped but the completed portal will allow residents to check and update their own household data.
• We have recently created a digital survey which will be used mainly by housing officers and property surveyors on handheld devices when they visit our customers’ homes. The aim of the survey is to ensure that we are consistently checking our customers’ housing needs, health and safety, and property condition. Any issues that Elim can address will be passed to the relevant housing or maintenance team for action.

Over the coming months, our housing officers will be contacting all their customers to arrange home visits and the completion of the household surveys. These can be arranged for a date and time that works for you.

All of the data collected through these visits will be used to inform future visiting schedules and case management. As a data owner, we have responsibility to make sure the data we hold is up to date and accurate. We also ensure that we are compliant with UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when collecting, storing and using residents’ personal data. Further details on how we store your data can be found here.

If you have any questions or concerns, or would like to share your views on how we could do more to make ‘making every contact count’ please speak to your Housing Officer or contact us directly on 01454 411172.