Solihull Community Housing (ALMO) Re-inspection
Rating: Excellent service | Excellent prospects for improvement
Solihull Community Housing (SCH) is making widespread and effective use of IT to maximise access to services and to support tenancy and estate management. SCH provides ‘self-help’ areas in its local offices and Solihull Connect offices where customers can access web based services and information. These have also been used to provide widespread access to the recently-established choice-based lettings scheme. To assist with this, SCH has invested in IT in libraries so that available properties can be advertised there too. SCH is also supporting the extension of web access to residents as part of a joint project aimed at tackling social exclusion by enabling broadband access to six tower blocks. IT hardware is being supplied by the Council for households with children.
SCH also has a high quality contact centre, for which operating hours have been recently been extended to 8.00am to 8.00pm and Saturday mornings, improving access to customers. The telephony and associated software there enables comprehensive monitoring of call volumes, query types, query resolution, texts and emailing and assists SCH to improve service to customers. CCTV technology is also being used effectively to prevent and detect anti-social behaviour and provides evidence for action against perpetrators. Linked to this, monitoring of door entry fob use is used to detect possible misuse of tenancies.