Your thoughts, opinions and experiences are at the heart of everything we do, and we’re committed to co-designing our services with you. Over the last year, your feedback has helped shape the services you receive and before writing this year’s report, we surveyed our customer consultation groups to find out what they really wanted to see included. Customer Voice, information on our homes, performance and neighbourhood enhancements were rated as the most important subjects so we’ve included lots of information about these topics.

We’re delighted that consultation response rates remained high this year:

• Policy consultations responses averaged over 28% against a target of 25%
• Customer service consultation responses averaged just below 28% against a target of 15%
• In total, you shared over 3,900 responses to consultation work during the year.

Your feedback across the year has influenced the services you receive and how policy decisions have been reached, including:

• The number of customers happy with a new Plentific project, where we’re using local trades to carry out a pilot response repairs service for homes in outlying arears, went up from 56% to 84% 
• The number of defects in new build homes that we didn’t complete inside of our target time decreased by 78% because we made changes to the process based on customer feedback
• We introduced parking management facilities at four of our estates to make parking easier for customers  
• We fitted CCTV and security lights in four of our communities to make these areas safer
• We installed a defibrillator at one of our extra care schemes
• We made changes to six policies including the Pets policy, Anti-Social Behaviour policy and Mutual Exchange policy based on your feedback.

There are now 1,582 customers in our involved customer groups.

We’ll always let customers who share their opinions know what impact their feedback has had, and how it has made a difference.  

In June 2021 we launched a survey, which all new customers will receive when they move into one of our homes, letting them know how they can get involved, the ways they can give feedback and how to be part of our growing customer consultation groups. Following this, 239 new customers joined our Customer Voice activities, giving even more of our customers the chance to have their say about the way we deliver services.  

Our annual customer group event is a great chance for all formal customer group members to come together to celebrate the fantastic work the groups have achieved during the year. At the 2021/22 event, Kate Dodsworth, Director of consumer regulation from the Regulator of Social Housing, joined as our guest speaker. Kate gave a presentation about how customers would be affected by changes in regulation, and how our involved customers can help us to meet the requirements that the new regulations will bring.

To see how our Customer Voice approach compares to other housing associations, this year we decided to assess ourselves against the Tenant Participation Advisory Service (Tpas) National Engagement Standards. Tpas will review how we interact and work with customers and will look at evidence, talk to colleagues, and more importantly talk to our customers to find where we could make improvements. We hope that this will improve our service even further.

Thank you to all our customers who took the time to give feedback during the year – we’re always looking to improve our services and your comments are crucial to this. If you’re not currently involved with us and would like to be, please get in touch by emailing customervoice@aster.co.uk or call on 0333 400 8255. For further information, click here.