How we’re improving repair appointments and how you can help

Published: 20 August 2024

Our day-to-day repairs service is one of the biggest advantages of renting a home from us, or any other social landlord.

Our aim is to provide you with a reliable and timely service where we aim to fix jobs on the first visit, wherever possible.

But we know that things don’t always go smoothly. We’ve been listening to our customers, and we know we need to improve the scheduling, booking and communication of your repair appointment.

Missed repair appointments waste time and money and have a knock-on effect on the service we deliver to you and other customers.

Following feedback from tenants, we have made the following improvements:

• We text you the day before the appointment and on the morning of your appointment to remind you that it’s happening. We all need a reminder sometimes! In this text we also let you know who will be carrying out the repair and the chance to rearrange it if the time is no longer convenient.
• “We’re on our way” - Our repair operatives will also try to call you enroute to let you know we’re on our way. Our aim is to do this with 100% of repair appointments.
• We’re organising focus groups with tenants who have had recent repairs to talk about what works and what doesn’t – with the aim of ironing out the bumps in our repairs service.
• We’ve increased the number of repair operatives who carry out responsive repairs to your home.

We are also looking to implement a new repair booking system which will allow you to amend a repair appointment at a time that is convenient for you.

Help us to get it right more of the time

On average, we complete around 300 repairs per month. In June 2024, 32% of day-to-day repair appointments were missed, the vast majority of these were due to the tenant not being at home when we turn up. We know sometimes they have been missed because we have not communicated clearly enough to you when your appointment will take place and we apologise for this. We hope that the improvements we are making to our appointment system, including text messages and phone calls, will help reduce missed appointments in the future.

We also know that sometimes emergencies crop up which means you can no longer make the appointment. We get it, life happens. All we ask is that you let us know so that we can book the operative on a different job and re-arrange your appointment.

What you can do to help us

• Make sure that the contact details we have for you are up to date.
• Watch out for texts or phone calls from us in the lead up to the appointment.
• If life happens and you can’t make the appointment, don’t worry. Just let us know beforehand and we can rearrange for a suitable date and time.
• If you forget to let us know and you are not home when we turn up, the operative will leave a ‘no access card’ through your door. Please get in touch with us straight away so that we can rearrange your appointment.

Take part in a repair focus group

We know there is still more work to do, and we are holding regular focus groups with tenants to delve into repair issues further. If you would like to take part in an upcoming focus group, email info@southliverpoolhomes.co.uk.

Find out more about our day-to-day repair service