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Section 3 Issues and concerns in research and consultation

Making the most of satisfaction surveys – Moray Council

The Moray Council have over 6,000 houses. Tenant satisfaction surveys have been conducted four times over the last ten years. These surveys are seen as important for the continuous improvement of service provision and as a way of tracking the extent to which the Council has responded to issues raised in previous surveys.

The 2004 survey was commissioned from external consultants. There was no capacity within the current workforce to undertake the exercise and the use of consultants was felt to provide an independent assessment. The 2004 survey was conducted by post and was broadly structured to follow similar lines to the 2001 survey in order to allow direct comparison of results and measure change over time. The response rate was 43% which is good for a postal survey. The questionnaire was 12 pages long and had 32 questions. These included some about the household, tenant views on their homes and the service provided by the Council and more general questions about what they would like to see happen in future. For the first time, the survey was followed up by four focus groups in Buckie, Elgin, Forres and Keith to enable more direct discussion with tenants on specific aspects of service provision. These were useful and allowed the consultants to seek further clarification on responses.

The consultants presented the survey findings to elected members and to tenants at a meeting of registered tenants’ organisations. The findings were published in the tenants’ newsletter and an action plan prepared. The Council is now in the process of creating a customer feedback policy to enable more comprehensive and systematic consideration of feedback at the point of service delivery.

Levels of satisfaction with housing staff and services had all increased since 2001 and the Council was pleased with the results. Whilst they learnt much from the responses, there were some areas where further information on tenant views would be helpful.

There were some constructive criticisms which have been welcomed as useful feedback in improving service delivery. One of the biggest sources of dissatisfaction was tenants not being kept up to date with information e.g. during delays in repairs. The Council know there is a case for more frequent communication with tenants and this is being addressed. In the future they will aim to make publications more relevant and interesting for tenants.

The Council plan to carry out further surveys every three years.

There are number of lessons to note from using this approach.

• It is important to congratulate staff where results are positive and also to welcome criticisms as important feedback for the improvement of service delivery.

• Avoid being unduly tied to using the same questions from previous years as these may not reflect current concerns and may undermine the usefulness of the findings.

• It is worth flagging up how the survey results have been used by saying to service users ‘following the recent satisfaction survey, we have changed……..’.

• In terms of the options for managing and commissioning research and consultation, the value of using consultants to provide independence has to be weighed up against the cost of commissioning the work. There may be scope for using the skills of in-house staff on different elements of the work, rather than contracting out the whole survey.

There is a need to think about how to gather service user feedback on a more regular basis to complement that from occasional satisfaction surveys.

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