Love Your Neighbourhood: Our new approach to providing services

Salix Homes has introduced a new way of working which will transform the services the organisation provides for all its customers.

Dedicated teams in each neighbourhood; knowledgeable staff on our estates, dealing with customer queries right first time and a community grant for each neighbourhood – are all part of our new approach to improving our communities.

We’ve listened to how our customers want us to provide services and that’s where we’re changing how we do things to make sure we’re doing everything we can to our communities great.

The changes our communities can now look forward to are:

• A dedicated teams for neighbourhoods – We have set up dedicated Neighbourhood Teams who are passionate and knowledgeable about the area you live in. They know the area inside out and will deal with letting homes, anti-social behaviour and community engagement in your area. Whether its regular estate walkabouts, supporting community events or working out of local hubs, they will be highly visible and responsive to the needs of the local community.
• A new Community Grant scheme – We’re setting up a new scheme where our customers can bid for grant funding for ideas that will benefit your community. If someone in your ward has a great idea but needs that helping hand, they may well be able to bid for our year-round grant. Watch this space for more information.
• A new team looking after the environment – We’ve brought together our cleaning and caretaking teams with a new Environment Team meaning we can keep our blocks, grounds and areas around our homes to a standard you expect and better respond to things like flytipping and graffiti.
• Getting it right first time – We’re making sure that when our customers contact us, we’ll be able to deal with the query there and then. Trained and knowledgeable teams will do their best to resolve the issue at that first point of contact to save calling back or being transferred elsewhere. In fact we’re so confident in that we’ll get it right, that we’re committing to getting 80% of calls resolved at the first point of contact.

Lee Sugden, chief executive at Salix Homes, said: “Everyone deserves to be proud of where they live and we want all our customer to love their neighbourhoods.

“That’s why we’re changing how we do things to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make sure our customers love where they live.

“We’ve been asking our customers what they want and how we can improve our services. We received great feedback and out of it all we’ve worked extremely hard to create dedicated teams in our neighbourhoods, a contact centre that will deal with most queries at first point of contact, community grants for your area and an expert, in-house, group of environment officers improving our communities.”

Despite these significant changes, we urge our customers to get involved in helping us develop the services we deliver.

We’re looking for volunteers with a few hours spare to ensure that the way we continue to develop these, and other services, it means that they are the best they can be and are delivered in a way that suits our customers.

We value your input and if you want to get involved, visit our website – or drop us a message on Facebook or Twitter.

Our social media channels will be highlighting the work in our communities with the hashtag #loveyourneighbourhood

Come and get involved in the conversation.