Plymouth Community Homes has retained its Customer Service Excellence accreditation for a fourth consecutive year in recognition of having a customer-focused culture.
PCH also earned an additional award of ‘Compliance Plus’ for going above and beyond in its work in one area, whilst retaining another two Compliance Plus awards from previous audits.
The CSE award is a well-regarded national quality mark awarded to organisations following a rigorous assessment and audit process, including an on-site auditing visit during which an impartial assessor meets with staff and residents.
To earn the CSE mark, an organisation must demonstrate that it meets the requirements of the scheme and has a truly customer-focused culture, supporting residents and listening to their views.
An assessor visited PCH for two days in May, meeting with residents and staff, and topics were discussed including PCH’s response to the Keyham WW2 bomb incident, new properties acquired at Hillcrest, and the new MyPCH portal.
The Customer Service Excellence Centre for Assessment (CfA) gave PCH a glowing report following the inspection visit, saying the organisation “continues to offer a high quality service to its tenants”.
The report found that “all staff interviewed or observed were customer focused, and their views listened to by their managers to further enhance the customer service.”
The PCH response to the Keyham incident was singled out for especial praise, and the report said it was “an example of the customer-focused culture of PCH, from the CEO through to frontline staff.”
PCH met the standard across all 57 areas of compliance, retained an additional award of Compliance Plus for two areas - Customer Insight and Culture of the Organisation, and won the extra recognition of Compliance Plus for a third area, Information & Access.
Natasha Kirkham, Quality Assurance Manager at PCH, said: “The CSE assessment is a very thorough process involving teams across PCH, with many staff giving up their time to meet with the assessor and talk through their work so PCH can retain this quality mark for another year.”
Gill Martin, Executive Director of Corporate Services, added: “It’s fantastic to see PCH retain its Customer Service Excellence status, and to increase the amount of areas where we’ve earned the extra ‘Compliance Plus’ recognition from two to three. This is testament to the care, consideration and thought which staff are putting in daily to ensure we deliver excellent services for our residents.
“As well as a great recognition of what we are doing well, the CSE process is also designed to promote continuous improvement, and we welcome the feedback from this report which we’ll work on over the coming year so we can keep putting customers first and meet our business plan objective of ‘delivering outstanding services for residents’.”
