Blog #4 - November 2022

Hello! Did you think I had forgotten about you? 

I’m so sorry that its been so long since my last blog, time seems to have gone by in a flash and all of a sudden its dark, cold and starting to feel a bit festive but let me give you a round up of all of the exciting things that have been happening in the Customer Service Team over the autumn. 

• Since 1st August, we have received 7509 calls and managed to answer 83% of them which is still a little bit short of our goal of 90% of calls which come into our team being answered. The main reason for this has been staff absence. We are hoping that with a strong December, we will finish the year managing to answer 85-90% of your calls. The great news is though, even though we’ve has some staffing challenges, all calls have passed our internal minimum standards so we are continuing to deliver great service.  
• You will maybe have seen from our socials and website that we have been awarded £61,000 from the Scottish Governments Fuel Support Fund, we are delighted that we will be able to use this money to help support you over the winter months in these challenging economic times. We are about to kick start phase 1 of this project and if your gas supply is currently capped, we will likely be contacting you to see if we can help alongside Scarf who are working in partnership with us to support this project.  
• Speaking of partnerships, we are also delighted to announce that we will be working closely with AberNecessities and CFINE as well as Scarf to try and provide additional support to our customers. If you would like to be referred to one of these services, please contact your Housing Officer or our team on 01224 423000. 
• We also planed our Jubilee Tree in Ellon, it was great to get it in the ground particularly after the Queen’s passing. We’re hoping the tree will thrive in its new home.

• Next up was our Financial Newletter, this was designed to provide some hints and tips on making your money go a bit further, we hope you found it useful and have plans to do similar publications in the future.  
• December is fast approaching and it will be a busy month for us as we plan to; publish our Winter Newsletter, hold rent consultation focus groups to try and put your minds at rest regarding what next years rent increase may look like and have a Christmas Open Day at our offices inviting you in for a warm drink and a chat and that’s all before we close on 23rd December. Please keep an eye on our social media and website for further details.  
• We also completed three walkabouts since August in Stonehaven and Aberdeen City.  These were a great success with 10 tenants involved. Walkabouts are extremely important and are the result of direct tenant requests.  We will continue to visit your neighbourhoods to help deal with ongoing issues and build relationships in our communities so please get in touch if you would like us to visit you.   
• Our Tenant Participation Strategy is now complete and of course our tenants were at the heart of this process. Your feedback from our summer newsletter consultation was really important along with our tenant meeting where six interested tenants helped us finalise the strategy. So, thank you to everyone involved and keep up the great feedback as we really can’t do it without you.