Strengthening our relationships with customers: our commitment to you

Strengthening our relationships with you, our customers, is so important to us, which is why we have signed up to the National Housing Federation’s (NHF) Together with Tenants Charter.

This charter was drawn up by the NHF after speaking to lots of social housing customers and housing providers. It sets out what customers can and should expect from their landlord – and how customers can hold them to account on these.

We’ve adopted these commitments to help us to work in partnership with you and be the excellent landlord we strive to be.

Kelly Webb, Operations Director Customer First said: “Customers are at the heart of what we do and their views are central to helping us create positive change. Being part of this National Housing Federation scheme will ensure our customers have even more of a voice, set out what they can expect from us and make us responsible for our actions.

“We carry out lots of customer involvement work to give our customers a say in what matters to them and we want to develop this further. There are opportunities to join our Customer Voice Panel, become a Neighbourhood Champion and more. If this sounds like you, we’d love you to get in touch. Email ci@fcho.co.uk to get involved.”

Our Together with Tenants commitments

Relationships

We will treat each other with respect and be open, honest and transparent at all times. We will support you in your tenancy through our services and deliver high levels of customer service at all times.

Communication

We will share clear, accessible and timely information on the issues that matter to you. This includes important information about your homes and local community, how we are working to address problems, how we are run, and information about performance on key areas of our work.

We communicate with you in a variety of ways including through our website, email newsletters, letters, text messages, and Facebook and Twitter.

If you need to get in touch with us, we will make it easy for you to speak to someone who can help and you can us your preferred method of contact.

Voice & Influence

Asking you for your views is important to us. We value your feedback and take it forward to help shape the decisions we make.

We want you to feel listened to by us on the issues that matter to you and be confident you can speak without fear. We have customers on our Board to represent the views of people who live in FCHO homes and we also encourage you to become members of our Customer Voice Panel (CVP) and Neighbourhood Champions groups. These forums enable you to tell us what you think and shape services to make them better for you, your family and other FCHO customers.

Accountability

We will work in partnership with you to independently scrutinise our work and hold us to account for the decisions that affect your homes and the services we deliver to you. We do this through our customer involvement groups, which help us check how we are performing and what we need to change.

Quality

We’ll make sure your home is good quality, well maintained, safe and well managed and check we are meeting our service standards. Continually improving your homes is also one of our main priorities - we know how important this is to you. We do this through our investment programme and Stock Condition Surveys to assess the condition of homes and help us plan where we need to invest money in our homes.

When things go wrong

We strive to deliver a high quality service to you and we’ll make it as simple as possible to for you to raise issues, make complaints and get them resolved. When we are dealing with your complaint we will give you timely advice and keep you informed at all stages and you can choose how you want us to contact you. We have a group of customers who help us learn from complaints at a monthly Complaints Governance Meeting, helping us make sure the same problems don’t happen again.

Read more about our Together with Tenants commitment.