At Jigsaw Homes Group, we operate two contact centres in Leigh and Ashton. The centres have an out-of-hours service which currently operates at the following times:- 6pm until 8am Monday to Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday and during office closures, e.g. bank holidays.
The purpose of this particular consultation was to understand our tenants’ priorities for an out-of-hours emergency call service. We also wanted to get feedback to key questions about how important tenants believe this service is for a range of activities. The responses of the survey will help us to shape and improve the service for our customers.
When answering the questions, we asked tenants to bear in mind things that they felt could not wait until the next working day and required an immediate response. 102 tenants took part in the survey from across Jigsaw Group.
Our Jigsaw Rewards members were asked to tell us how important it is to them that a range of services are included in an out-of-hours emergency telephone service.
90% of tenants placed a very high importance on being able to report repairs that need an immediate response. These emergency repairs are defined as having an immediate danger to the health or the risk of safety to a resident, or where there is a danger of serious damage to the buildings structure, e.g burst water pipes, or no heating and hot water in winter months.
82% of tenants place a low importance on reporting repairs that do not need an immediate response, e.g. dripping tap or faulty communal aerial.
75% of tenants place a very high importance on reporting incidents that may affect our properties, e.g. flooding.
The majority of tenants also place a high importance on being able to report crime and anti-social behaviour. However, they did recognise that these issues should be reported to the police in the first instance.
Lower importance was placed on dealing with rent arrears and organising gas service appointments, with the majority of tenants agreeing that these issues can wait until normal working hours when queries can be answered quickly and accurately.
Following this consultation, our out-of-hours service will no longer be taking details of non-emergency repairs, but advising callers to contact the office on the next working day.
This will have two benefits for customers:
- It will free up Connect advisor time in the mornings to take in-bound calls from tenants.
- It will free up out-of-hours advisor time to handle emergency repairs calls.
We are continuing to improve our digital services, which do provide customers with the ability to contact us at their convenience, 24 hours per day, seven days per week.
If you would like to get involved in giving your feedback about our services in exchange for rent credits or high street vouchers, join Jigsaw Rewards today!
To contact the out-of-hours service, click here.