Listening to customers and learning from when things don’t go as expected is important to us. In this article, we want to share how feedback about repairs at Yarranton Close has helped us improve our service.  

Between May and September 2024, several customers reported concerns about dangerous holes in the communal yard area, which unfortunately resulted in three customers suffering injuries from trips and falls.

We acknowledge that our initial response to these safety concerns fell short of the standard you should expect. The case highlighted several areas where we needed to do better, including how we communicate between teams, how we record repair locations, and how quickly we respond to safety concerns. 

When the first report came in during May 2024, we didn't act quickly enough to make the area safe. Despite multiple reports and incidents over the following months, including several injuries to customers, our response remained fragmented. A significant error occurred when repair work was mistakenly carried out at the wrong location, further delaying the necessary fixes at Yarranton Close. 

However, persistence from customers in reporting these issues helped us identify important gaps in our service, and we've now made several key improvements: 

• We've improved how we record repair locations in communal areas, ensuring we capture exact details about where problems are located. This means our repair teams can find and fix issues more quickly and accurately.
• Our customer service team has received additional training to better identify health and safety emergencies in communal areas, ensuring urgent issues get an immediate response.
• We've created a central system for recording safety concerns and injury reports, making it easier for all our teams to spot recurring problems quickly.
• We're launching a new "see it, say it, report it" campaign to encourage all our staff to report any issues they notice while visiting our properties, helping us catch problems earlier.
• We're also exploring the use of QR codes in communal areas to make it easier for both customers and staff to report issues instantly.

The full resurfacing works at Yarranton Close were completed on 23 September 2024, providing a long-term solution to the problems experienced. While we regret the time it took to reach this resolution, we're grateful for the patience and feedback from customers throughout the process.

Our commitment to you is that we will continue to learn from this experience. We've improved how our repairs, customer service, and property management teams work together, and we've put better systems in place to ensure safety concerns are addressed promptly. 

The feedback has led to real improvements in how we maintain communal areas across all our properties and we now have better systems in place to respond quickly and effectively.