Our teams have been hard at work supporting and engaging with residents across the country. Together we have made a difference in dozens of communities, adding value beyond what people might expect from their landlord.
Housing calls answered this year
Repairs calls answered this year
Income calls answered this year
Emails received this year into our customer service team
Supporting our customers and the environment
We’re always looking to improve our customer service and reduce our impact on the environment. Our new noise app makes it easy for our customers to record possible noise nuisance and enables them to share with their housing officer in real time. This reduces the time it takes for us to tackle the problem, removes the need for specialist equipment and usually reduces the amount of travel or paperwork.
Our new office hubs are reducing the distances colleagues need to travel for work. Our hubs are located within the communities we serve, providing colleagues with a local and professional environment to work from that is easily accessible to our customers. Local staff no longer need to travel back and forth to regional offices. Freeing up time to support our customers, whilst the reduced travel also benefits the environment.
We have transformed our process for sharing information about our empty properties, making the process fully digital. This has vastly reduced the amount of paperwork involved, as the app allows key information and images to be recorded and shared online. Before the app, colleagues recorded information manually. This took more time, involved more travel and potentially increased the length of time required to get the home ready for its next resident.
Your Complaints help make us better
We aim to deliver a great service to customers but, like all organisations, don’t always get it right. When things go wrong, it’s important that you let us know so we can work with you to fix the issue. We’ve worked with customers to improve how we handle complaints, which has made the process clearer and easier.
The number of customer complaints we receive continues to rise in line with the increase in demand for our services. This is especially true for repairs and maintenance where we received more than 1,900 more complaints than last year. We continue to look at how we can respond to complaints more quickly and effectively with the current focus on implementing a new complaint handling operating model designed to enhance both the speed and quality of response. We have already seen some improvements.
We have, doubled the size of the team responding to complaints and halved the amount of time it takes us to resolve a complaint. We have also been able to resolve more complaints at the first stage, resulting in more customers being happy with the outcome. Customers will help us decide how we evolve our approach to complaints and their feedback will help us continuously refine and develop our approach.
We have also had a renewed focus on improving our complaints management processes. Our new Service Improvement team leads on much of this work to help us deliver a better service for you. The team is embedding a customer outcomes framework to help us focus on the things that matter to you. This will link to new reporting on Tenant Satisfaction Measures for the Regulator of Social Housing.
We have reviewed our approach with over 150 resident members of our Complaints Community of Interest. We continue to focus on resolution and better communications with you. We see complaints as an opportunity to learn and a chance to put things right.
Whilst our focus is always on resolving a resident’s individual concerns, we also see complaints as an excellent opportunity to learn where things aren’t working and to find improvements to our services.
For more information on how to raise a complaint please visit the complaints section of our website.
We know we still have more to do with how we deal with customer complaints and have now commissioned independent experts to help us improve further and make sure we are on the right track.
Complaints breakdown 2022/2023
Complaints received - Housing England
Complaints received - Supported Living
Complaints received - Supported Living (Extra Care)
What customer complaints are about
- 0.31% Aids and Adaptations
- 1.44% Anti-Social Behaviour
- 0.40% Applications - Lettings - Transfers
- 0.02% Building Safety
- 15.39% Damp and Mould
- 2.39% Development
- 2.96% Estates
- 11.85% Gas repairs and servicing
- 3.83% Housing Management
- 1.10% Income Management
- 0.48% Reinvestment
- 57.49% Responsive Repairs
- 0.72% Service charges
- 1.31% Sanctuary Supported Living support
- 0.32% Uncategorised
Number of Anti-Social Behaviour cases reported for England
Number of tenants registered with Homeswapper
Number of swaps on Homeswapper
Customer Outcomes
Customer outcomes are important to help us to understand the difference we make as an organisation. They tell us the result of our actions or, in simple terms, what has and hasn’t worked.
From April 2024 we’ll use our new outcomes framework to help us focus on what’s most important to you. This forms a key part of our strategy to improve the experience of our customers.
Outcomes can sometimes be difficult to define. Customer service can range from a short phone request for advice, to many years of continued support in our Supported Living homes.
We’re proposing four primary outcomes for our customers:
We’ll continue to consult with you and our key stakeholders to ensure these outcomes reflect what is important to you.
Overall client satisfaction Sanctuary Supported Living
Surveys were completed by residents
Said the service they receive helps them to be as independent as they can
Said that staff listen to residents and goals are worked on together
Tenant Satisfaction Measures
Every day, we ask a random sample of customers to tell us about the repair we carried out at their home the day before. This feedback gives us insight into what we’re doing well and first-hand suggestions about what we might want to look at improving. We currently seek formal feedback from around 3,000 customers a year in line with new requirements introduced by the Regulator of Social Housing in April 2023.
The regulator’s Tenant Satisfaction Measures cover the five themes listed below:
- Keeping properties in good repair.
- Maintaining building safety.
- Respectful and helpful engagement.
- Effective handling of complaints.
- Responsible neighbourhood management.
We plan to use this approach across more of our services in line with our commitment to providing a better service to customers.
Explore the report
Your Home
We recognise that this has been a challenging year for our services. Despite this, you will see there were a number of significant achievements and there are more improvements for the year ahead.
Find out more
Your Sanctuary Community
Working at Sanctuary involves so much more than providing people with a safe and secure place to live. We strive to create neighbourhoods with a sense of community, one you are happy to call ‘home’.
Find out more
Your Voice
We want you, our residents, to know that Sanctuary cares, because there can be no doubt – we do absolutely care about you. This is reflected in the great work our teams do every day. Engagement is at the heart of what we do.
Find out more