Evolve Housing + Support is a Housing Association and community support charity, working with around 2000 people each year, across 8 London boroughs.
Evolve set up their Customer Scrutiny Panel in 2013 to gain insight into areas where services can improve. It is led by Evolve’s Quality Team and is made up of at least 5 customers, who decide on the area they will scrutinise and make recommendations for improvement.
So far the panel has scrutinised: maintenance, the complaints process (twice), communication with customers, customer involvement and management of anti-social behaviour.
The panel lead the investigation using internal performance and benchmarking data, talking to other customers and staff to gain their feedback and write a report summarising their recommendations which is sent to and actioned by the Leadership Team.
Recommendations and improvements Evolve have made include:
Inclusion of customer involvement KPI's or targets within the organisational scorecard;
Adapting Health and Safety audits to include 'safety tours' of Evolve’s buildings and
Introducing an automated text messaging service to report repairs and receive updates on maintenance.
The scrutiny panel process has developed and changed over the years- at first the reports took a long time to come out. This was partly down to the fact that customers have busy lives but they reviewed the process of the panel and now we have a swifter “Scrutiny Panel Express” approach, which is more accessible to customers and has led to greater engagement in the reviews.
The insight Evolve gains into what’s important to customers and where Evolve can improve or work harder is invaluable. Evolve highly recommends a Customer Scrutiny Panel to any other smaller Housing Associations.
About Evolve Housing + Support
We believe in building on people’s strengths, aspirations and goals to help end the cycle of homelessness and help them move forward with their lives.
We offer a programme of support tailored to meet people’s individual needs, including housing, employment and skills training, mentoring and counselling. We work with young parents and children at risk of exclusion to build the skills and resilience that can help prevent homelessness. We campaign to end street homelessness. We build affordable homes to help people move on to an independent life.
Our mission is to help children, young people and adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness reach their potential, and move on to live happy, fulfilled lives.
Comments