Arawak Walton Housing Association

Customer care

We aim to provide the best service we can for all of our customers therefore in all our contact with you we will:

Deal with you quickly, politely and fairly;

We will do this by:

Being polite and respectful at all times, treating you as an individual and being sensitive to cultural differences;

Wearing our name badges as all times and identifying ourselves by name when we answer the telphone;

Make sure you are fully aware of the options available to you;

Answering your telephone call within 6 rings and transferring you without delay to someone who can help: we will phone you back if you ask us to;

Providing a clean, tidy and welcoming office with opening hours: Mon - Fri 9.00am-5.00pm;

Keeping appointments;

Keeping waiting times to a minimum if you arrive without an appointment, and arranging a convenient time for an appointment if the person best able to help is not available;

Helping you if you have difficulty in filling in a form;

Providing an interpreter if you find English difficult to understand;

Training staff to respond to you effectively and fully, showing consideration and fairness at all times;

Give you useful and accurate information about the services we provide

We will do this by:

Giving you information on how long you may have to wait for rehousing with us;

Provide you with detailed information on the location, type and size of housing in our stock;

providing information on the availability of properties from other social landlords;

letting you know within 28 days whether we will be able to help you with rehousing;

At the point of offering you a home, provide detailed information on the property itself and the area you will be moving into.

Provide a high quality repair service;

We will do this by:

Fixing problems at the same time as inspecting it where possible;

Asking for your comments on our service each time we carry out a repair and using these comments to improve our service;

Taking your views into account when we review the list of contractors we use;

Requiring our contractors to treat all tenants and their homes with courtesy and respect;

Making appointments convenient for you, when practical, for a contractor to call;

Keeping you informed if there are delays in dealing with a repair;

Having a service for emergency repairs service outside of office hours 365 days a year;

Setting response times for carrying out repairs which limit inconvenience to the tenant while making best use of funds;

Monitoring our performance in dealing with your requests for repairs and publishing the results in newsletter twice a year;

Undertaking programmed / planned works to maintain the quality of homes we provide, and dealing with design issues identified by tenants;

Providing, where practical, adaptations to your home, should you or a member of your family require them because of disability;

Make it easy for you to question any of our decisions;

Provide information that is useful, accurate and easy to understand;

We will do this by:

Providing a range of up-to-date leaflets that explain the services we offer;

Offering to talk through with you any of our leaflets or documents;

We will always explain the tenancy agreement in detail to new tenants;

Always using plain language when we write or talk to you;

Sending you a Newsletter four times a year;

Offering to provide the information in different formats e.g. tape or translation or offering you the services of an interpreter if you want one;

Checking our leaflets and documentation to make sure they meet your needs;

Ask you what you think of our service and act on what you say;

We will do this by:

Carrying out surveys of what you think of our services and telling you the results;

Having a service improvement plan based on the outcome of these surveys;

Consulting you on how best to develop our services;

Asking for your views on the design of your home and using them to update our design brief;

Providing cards for your suggestions about our services and act on your comments;

Offering home visits where it is difficult for you to get to us;

Keep you informed of our progress and performance;

We will do this by:

Having response times for our services and reporting our performance to you twice a year;

we will:

Answer your letters within 10 working days;
Answer your telephone call within 6 rings;
Acknowledge your housing application within 14 days;
Tell you what action we will take on your complaint within 15 days;
Acknlowledge your ASB* complaint within 5 days;
Agree an action plan for an ASB* complaint within 21 days;
Carry out emergency repairs within 24 hours;
carry out urgent repairs within 7 days;
carry out routine repairs within 21 days;

*ASB is Anti Social Behaviour. We recognise that where serious incidents occur we will act within 24 hours to resolve a problem

Giving you details of our performance annually, making comparisons with similar organisations. This information will include:

Level of rent arrears;
Number of empty properties;
Amount spent on repairs;
Amount spent on offices and staff;
Number of properties let each year;
Number of and type of property within our stock;
Repair response performance;
Rent levels and rent increases;
Who we have housed and their reasons for needing new homes;

Respect your confidentiality at all times;

Always providing the facilities for a private interview;

Never discussing your private affairs in front of others without your permission;

Treating personal details in strict confidence;

Letting you see the personal details we hold about you;

Be positive in our efforts to serve you and the community you live in

We will do this by:

Actively promoting issues of concern to the community with local and national politicians and policy makers;

Supporting community based ventures which bring benefits to local people;

Participating in programs that enable local people to gain in skills and confidence;

Sponsoring, promoting, assisting and facilitating community based initiatives;

Working in partnership with other social landlords to co-ordinate our activities to develop and support the community.

Click on any of the links above to tell you more about our commitment to Customer Service using the above as headings.

If you have any ideas on service standards you would like us to include in this Charter we will be very pleased to hear from you.

Please contact your Housing Officer to discuss, write to us or telephone our Chief Executive using the contact details in our online contact section.