Clarion publishes first set of Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) scores
The Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) form part of the new consumer standards social housing providers are regulated by. Social housing providers are required to report their performance against them annually. The measures are designed to allow tenants to see how well their landlord is doing, and to give the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) an idea of which landlords might need to improve things.
We took the decision to publish our TSMs externally at the same time we submitted them to the RSH. You can see our scores on our residents' website.
At Clarion, we are committed to monitoring our performance, holding ourselves accountable and being transparent.
Our lower TSM scores align with the parts of our service delivery that we have already identified as key improvement areas and have prioritised as part of our major transformation programme. We embarked upon this programme in recognition of our changing operating environment and the mounting pressures we face.
Called “Connect”, our transformation programme started in the summer of 2023 with a series of deep dive diagnostics, looking first at repairs and maintenance, housing management and complaints. We are now working on our operating model and reviewing how we are structured to make sure we have the right resource and the right skills in the right part of the organisation. It will take some time to roll out pilot programmes, embed learning and see this reflected in our TSM scores but we are confident these will improve year-on-year.
We are already seeing improvements as a result of our interventions in our regular, independently measured customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys are different from the perception scores in the TSMs because they take place shortly after the resident has had a transaction with us and are therefore influenced by a recent experience with us. Our transactional customer satisfaction surveys have seen us score at least 80% each month, and we ended March 2024 achieving a score of 84.3%.
For the TSMs, we used a survey approach which gives a broad range of residents the opportunity to take part and involves a mix of online and telephone. We are also using the opportunity to ask additional questions, around repairs, complaints and anti-social behaviour, in order to get richer insight and to complement our existing customer insight data we gather through our annual Index survey. In addition, we are exploring sector trends that are emerging through the TSM data, such as the differences in scores between housing associations that operate in urban areas and smaller, rural housing associations.
We welcome the use of consistently collected data in order to get a rounded view of the sector’s performance, and we hope this will be a useful tool in aiding learning and driving improvements to services for all social housing residents.