Social housing providers - performance management

Shropshire Gas has developed sophisticated performance monitoring systems to measure and report on operational performance, customer satisfaction and quality assurance. This assists our clients to improve their performance to achieve top quartile ranking against their peer groups.

Measuring and managing performance is vital to:

	Ensure a continuous improvement culture is implemented and continuous improvements are being delivered throughout the life of the contract.
	Make improvements quantifiable and tangible.
	Demonstrate ‘best value’ and ‘value for money’.
	Focus the operational activity on the most important areas.
	Ensure competitiveness.
	Recognise and reward exceptional performance.
	Benchmark performance against peer groups.

Typical performance monitoring measures include:

	Annual Service Programme -vs- Actual.
	No access ratio.
	Appointments made and kept.
	Jobs attended on time.
	Average attendance time.
	Jobs completed on time.
	Average completion time.
	First time fix.
	Jobs completed on estimate.
	Actual accident frequency rate against target rate.
	Customer satisfaction measure against key components of the service.

Customer care

Satisfied tenants and end users of our service are paramount to our success and we are passionate about this. In our view, real customer care starts with robust systems to ensure the risk of failure or poor service is minimised. However, should a failure or undesirable situation arise, an efficient system needs to be in place not only to rectify the situation speedily but to ensure a similar kind of situation does not re-occur. For the above reasons, we have developed the following systems with assistance from our clients and their tenants:

Operating procedures and instructions
Carefully designed step-by-step instructions control the way we deliver the service. The purpose of these procedures and instructions is to ensure we deliver high quality service and minimise the risk of failures or poor service.

Customer care policy
Where as the Operating Procedures and Instructions determine the way we physically carry out the tasks, the Customer Care Policy gives the important instructions and guidelines of the way in which we expect our employees to treat tenants and end users of our service.

Customer complaints procedure
Despite detailed preventative instructions and careful planning things may not always go as desired. For these rare events, a fast-track complaints procedure has been developed to ensure tenants have easy access to efficient handling of their complaint or concern. The aim of the fast-track complaints procedure is to ensure that an acceptable solution to rectify the situation is provided without unnecessary delay and any inconvenience is minimised.

Quality assurance
A key aim of the quality system is to ensure that we adhere to the above procedures and therefore ‘practice what we preach’. Quality is an inherent part of the service we provide. Quality is assured by regular monitoring, undertaken by our impartial auditing personnel. A significant budget is allocated to ensure this happens. We have developed an internal assurance system which helps us monitor all aspects of the service to customers - ranging from the way we provide domestic gas services, to the repeatability of internal processes and procedures needed to ensure we deliver and maintain a quality service.

Measuring tenant satisfaction
After completion of a job, a Tenant Satisfaction Questionnaire would be left with the tenant giving them a convenient way of forwarding comments regarding the service they received. This helps us to monitor satisfaction and further improve our service.

Developing the service together with tenants' representatives
Regular dialogue with tenants’ representatives has proven to be a very effective way of receiving feedback and ideas from tenants. This has helped us to develop our service and customer care to meet better the needs of tenants.

Effective and efficient systems

Shropshire Gas property maintenance and repair systems are proven to significantly increase first time access rates – a clear priority for all registered social landlords – particularly when complying with gas maintenance that carries a legal obligation. In addition to the impressive financial benefits generated through increased efficiency, you are also rewarded with high levels of tenant security and satisfaction.

Our systems cater for both planned maintenance as well as call out repair services. Particularly reassuring for tenants is our ‘Safeguard’ system. The tenant is automatically telephoned with the time, name and security password of the engineer arriving at their property.

Shropshire Gas can:

	Significantly improve your first time access rates;
	Improve operational efficiency;
	Generate long-term cost savings for your organisation; and
	Demonstrate greater concern for your tenants’ safety.

Find out more gas safety information for landlords, property management companies and letting agencies.

Find out about our health and safety standards.

Contact us today

To find out more about the services we offer to social housing providers contact us on 01630 656161 or email service@shropshiregas.com

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