Wolverhampton Homes launches Homes Direct
Released: 29 March 2007
Wolverhampton Homes’ Repairs Reception Service is being relaunched as Homes Direct, to mark the expansion and improvement of the contact centre.
Changes have been put in place since last year to enhance the Repairs Reception Service as part of wider measures to modernise the way Wolverhampton Homes deals with its customers.
The service is provided by the arms length management company that manages most of Wolverhampton’s council housing, to deal with repair requests by telephone, e-mail and on-line.
This week’s relaunch as Homes Direct celebrates the improvements made to date and aims to highlight how progress is continuing, to build on the high levels of customer satisfaction which already exist.
The telephone number, 01902 556789, remains the same for the service.
Councillor Pat Byrne, Chair of the Wolverhampton Homes Board, said: “We’ve known for some time that to be truly ‘customer focused’ we need to improve the ways in which tenants and leaseholders can access our services.
“Most customers prefer to deal with us by phone and place a lot of value on getting a fast, efficient response to their enquiry.”
Towards the end of last year the Repairs Reception Service was expanded to deal with all repairs enquiries. This meant that there was no need to ring separate numbers to report gas and electric repairs. The telephone number appears on all Wolverhampton Homes repairs vans.
During the current year over 102,000 calls have been handled by the highly trained staff who are supported by modern communications systems. A total of 94.2 % of these calls were answered within 30 seconds or less.
The next stage of improving the telephone contact arrangements is to gradually expand the repairs contact centre to cover all initial enquiries including those currently dealt with by local housing offices.
To improve services further, a new customer enquiry system will be implemented shortly which will enable staff to track all enquiries. Then, Homes Direct will start to deal with a range of services which would have previously been dealt with by Wolverhampton Homes’ local offices. The services offered will be developed over the next twelve months or so.
Details of the changes will be published on the Wolverhampton Homes website and through its regular Tenants’ Up-Date newsletter.
Issued by the press office.