Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Annual Report 2023

Working with our customers

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Listening to and acting on the voice of our customers and residents is at the heart of decision making.

Our customer engagement and involvement teams work across the group to make sure all customers have an opportunity to be involved in service delivery and improvement programmes. By listening and working together we can hear first-hand what works well, what doesn’t and where we can make improvements.

A Retirement Living Co-ordinator and customers walking together in Hob House Court based on the Wirral.

Our focus is on expanding our customer engagement structures to engage with customers more meaningfully, fully embracing the diversity of our customers to reflect the neighbourhoods where we work and using targeted customer insight to ensure customer voice is heard.

We are making real progress across the group, including:

  • creating a forum for ethnically diverse customers to meet and provide feedback on our services
  • continuing to seek ways to communicate with our LGBTQIA+ customers and customers who have disabilities and long-term health conditions in order to find the best channels for meaningful consultation
  • providing equality impact assessment training for customer engagement and involvement colleagues, enabling them to assess the impact of their work on customers with different protected characteristics
  • launching One Community, our new digital engagement platform for One Housing customers, and encouraging the use of other digital channels (such as our website and social media) to provide residents with more tools to engage with us in a way that suits their needs
  • backed by funding through our charitable Foundation, developing wider services to help some of our most disadvantaged customers to access opportunities to improve their livelihoods, health and wellbeing.

Customers and staff cooking at Centre 28 in Hull, Terry Street.

While we are making progress, we also realise we still have plenty to do. We will continue to use customer journey mapping to highlight any issues encountered by our customers when using our services to bring the customer experience to life, to help provide insight and to drive satisfaction with the services we provide.