E&J Estates outlines improvements to services and communications in response to homeowner feedback

Earlier this year we were pleased to launch our new website. We did this primarily to help our homeowners to better understand what E&J Estates does as a company and improve our communication with homeowners. We also wanted to make it easier to access helpful contacts and answers to common queries on topics such as insurance renewals, payments and lease variations.

As part of this commitment to improving the openness and transparency of our communications, we also conducted a survey on how homeowners interact with us and their views on the experience of that communication.

We were pleased that over a thousand people took part in the survey, providing us with a wealth of useful feedback. A large majority (78%) of those who responded told us they found our answers to their queries either fairly helpful or very helpful. 77% of respondents told us their issue was resolved after contacting us. When asked to describe the response they received, the most commonly selected options were ‘friendly’, ‘polite’ and ‘professional’.

It’s great to receive positive feedback, but we know there is a lot we can still do to improve our service and how we communicate with homeowners. After reviewing the feedback received from the survey, we are keen to make changes where possible to address some of the most common issues raised.

One of the most frequently raised subjects was response times for enquiries. We fully appreciate that our existing service standard of a 10 day response time, whilst in-line with industry standards, can prove frustrating for people who have tight deadlines, for example when selling their property. In reality, in most cases we do better than the service standard. We will therefore reflect this by reducing our target to a maximum of 7 days and will task our teams to achieve this. We hope to reduce the target further in future.

Similarly, several respondents highlighted improvements that could be made to the tone and helpfulness of communications with E&J staff, particularly when a homeowner has problems or may be in financial difficulty. We will continue our practice of encouraging our teams to recognise the importance of empathy and a helpful approach, and will ensure that this remains central in our staff training

Finally, looking at the website itself and how customers interact with it, a number of people suggested that we could improve self-service options to allow access to statements, confirmation of payment status and other useful information. We are currently assessing options in these areas.

We also hope the refreshed website will answer many common queries, promote better access to our specialist teams and provide a platform to keep homeowners up to date with our work to support them.
Going forward, we will continue to evaluate our service regularly, to ensure we are continually providing a professional and helpful response, and that dealing with us is as simple as possible.

Thank you to all of you who took part in the survey and we welcome any further feedback or comments, which can be made by emailing enquiries@eandjestates.co.uk