05 July 2022
Summary:Lynda Davis recently joined MTVH as our new Head of Customer Voice working within the Customer Services directorate. We sat down with Lynda to find out more about her role, upcoming projects, and how her team is working to amplify customer voices.
Please tell us about your role and what it involves.
My role is to set the standards for how we engage with our customers across MTVH, as they are clearly our key audience and the people who matter most. I make sure that we are adhering to the current but also upcoming regulatory requirements regarding customer involvement. At the moment, this involves setting up our Customer Voice Framework which outlines how we will listen to our residents, act on their feedback and then most importantly, tell them what we’ve done with their feedback and check with them if we have taken the right actions – this is our Customer Voice Model and it follows a “you said, we did, you felt” format.
Who is in your team and what do they do?
There are two teams that I look after – the Customer Voice team and the Customer Engagement team. Each team plays a key role in making sure that listening to customers is at the heart of what we do at MTVH.
The Customer Engagement team support our involved residents such as Customer Council and Regional Panel members, providing them with training and information that will help them to complete their roles. These groups are comprised of MTVH customers who Influence the development and the type of services MTVH provides.
This team are also responsible for analysing trends in customer concerns by looking at our customer insight, customer contact and customer complaints data and then using this to reach out to our network of involved residents to ask about their experiences; essentially, they make sure that the voice of every customer is listened to by looking at what customers are saying to MTVH teams when they get in touch with us. The Customer Engagement Lead also helps me to stay on top of our regulatory requirements.
The Customer Voice team is made up of three Resident Voice Coordinators, one per region, and a Customer Voice Manager. Amongst a host of other things their role is to engage with local residents, supporting the formation of tenant and resident associations and completing listening activities within local communities. They also support the regional panels, making sure that they are getting the support they need to scrutinise MTVH services in their regions and make recommendations to the necessary teams within MTVH.
What do you enjoy the most about your role?
Great question! I am someone who really enjoys a puzzle, seeing where the clues are and then figuring out the solution, I love a good sudoku! I think that’s why I enjoy working with customers, in the past I worked in customer contact centres and complaints teams, roles where it is all about finding solutions that work for customers and the organisation. In this role, I get to listen to customers and colleagues to find clues about how we can do better or more to help provide homes to people and opportunities to live well. At the moment, there is a lot of focus on Social Housing providers to do more to support residents. My role gives me the opportunity to build the bridge between customers and colleagues and to help us to work in partnership to do this.
Tell us about some of projects that are on the horizon.
Since I joined MTVH I have been working on our Customer Voice Framework, our guide to how we can embed a culture of listening to customers across the organisation in a simple, meaningful way. My team and I are now developing the guidance that we can share with our colleagues on how to do this and we are also working with our involved customers to build stronger partnerships that will allow us to really amplify the voice of our customers within MTVH. What I am most excited about is the development of our online customer engagement platform which will allow us to hear from more customers about their experiences and their thoughts about how we can improve our services. The plan is to launch this platform by the end of August.
How can residents make their voice heard?
The new Customer Voice Framework makes it easier for a customer to have their voice heard. With the support of our Performance and Insight colleagues, the Customer Engagement team will make sure that we are spotting trends in what customers are saying to us when they get in touch, that we are listening to what customers are saying through complaints, surveys and even calls.
We are also developing a programme of activities that customers will be able to take part in to share their views with MTVH colleagues. These activities will range from online surveys taking under 10 minutes on our new engagement platform, to task and finish groups that may take a few hours during a month.
For customers who want to be part of something on a longer-term basis, they can get in touch with the Customer Voice team by emailing yourvoice@mtvh.co.uk and we can share details about forming a local Tenant and Resident Association or how to apply to be part of our Regional Panels or Customer Council.
The most important thing we can do as MTVH colleagues is to listen to our customers when they get in touch with us. We all have a part to play in ensuring that we hear what is being said, taking any required actions and then checking back in with the resident to make sure we have gotten things right.