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Consulting you on our services

Over the next year we want to improve the range and quality of services – and make them easier to access.

Historically, if you wanted a service you visited your local housing office. But times have changed – you can now pay your rent or request a repair 24 hours a day over the internet, or by calling us.

What have we done so far?

• We’ve opened the Housing Service Centre at Hounds Gate
• We’ve creating a dedicated Rents Contact Centre
• We’ve launched a new website.

What are we planning to do?

We know that most of our 30,000 customers prefer to talk to us over the telephone, rather than visiting a housing office. So we’re creating a new contact centre.

This will bring together repairs reporting, Homelink advice, rents advice and the Nottingham On Call care alarm service as well as anti-social behaviour, tenancy management and estate management enquiries - via a single phone number.

We are planning to install more free phones and kiosks inside local community buildings, where you can access our website or bid for a property.

We are also doing a lot more home visits, providing local housing surgeries and spending extra time out on estates helping to improve your environment.

The future of local housing offices

Because we’ve expanded the ways you can access our services, the numbers of visitors to some of our housing offices has dropped over the last few years. Those offices cost a lot to run. Is having so many housing offices across the city the most effective use of your money?

The more offices we have, the fewer employees we have to deal with enquiries at the busy offices. The three offices that are least used by customers are Lenton, Bilborough and the Victoria Centre housing offices.

Did you know?

• There are 12 different ways you can pay your rent
• Paying over the counter is the most expensive way to pay
• A payment by direct debit costs us around 16p but currently only 16% of tenants do. We want to improve that figure
• A payment using Paypoint costs us less than 50p
• Only half of the people who use the Lenton office actually live locally
• 9 out of 10 people who use Bilborough office would happy to use another one nearby or use a different payment method
• Only two people an hour visit the Victoria Centre office which makes every query cost over £19 to process
• Processing a payment at Bilborough costs 10 times that of a Direct Debit or Paypoint transaction

The Audit Commission Inspection report published in January 2009 said that we have:

A strong corporate focus on access and customer care. This is underpinned by a clear, comprehensive customer focus strategy which addresses key issues raised by customers. This is providing focus for continued improvement in this area

Tell us what you think

In early May we asked you to comment on our plans to improve our services to you. We are now collecting them together and will publish them in the near future in our tenant and leaseholder newsletter - News from Nottingham City Homes - and on this website.

(Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:00:00 GMT, amended Mon 11 May)

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