Voice of the Customer
Dave a 16 year resident of Accord and now GreenSquareAccord, based Stourbridge.
This month we are launching a new section, somewhere for the real voice of the customer to be heard. This month I talk to Dave a sixteen year resident of Accord and now GreenSquareAccord, based in Stourbridge. Have things improved since this latest merger?
How long have you been a GreenSquareAccord resident?
16 years and four months.
That’s quite a while.
Unfortunately yes. It’s fifteen years and three months with Accord and a year since the merge with GreenSquare.
Did you know much about GreenSquare before the merger?
I didn’t know anything about them but obviously since I’ve been researching, I’ve read quite a lot of negative comments about that organisation and staff. You know, like people not getting repairs done, emails not answered. Just general sort of lacklustre response to anything that people have got issues with, and an arrogant, very corporate, what’s the word I’m looking for? Insolent attitude towards tenants that pay the rent, that actually pay for their jobs.
As a GreenSquare resident, I did a similar thing with Accord and found the same issues and my fear was do two underperforming housing associations make one good one and I think here we are, a year down the line.
Yeah I mean I’m going to be honest, as an Accord tenant, things were very good 16 years ago and I have noticed a year by year degradation but I would say that if I’ve got a choice of being under Accord pre-merging without GreenSquare, I’d take that back any day to be quite honest. I would say that definitely over the past four or five years, things have gotten worse but not deteriorated as much as they have over the past 12 months. Since the merger it’s absolutely gone downhill mate, you know, to a level where when you raise issues and complaints and even the Customer First team don’t contact you back in the complaint department and you had to resort to go out to the Housing Ombudsman and they have to intervene and force GreenSquareAccord to act and then they don’t even act on letters off the Ombudsman. Oh it’s a very sad state of affairs.
I’ve had examples with the Ombudsman and with the Information Commissioners’ Office. Have you worked with GreenSquareAccord in any other capacity?
I sit on two panels, well I did until the engagement team got made redundant and they dissolved the panels. So that was the Scrutiny Panel and the Complaints and Communication Panel.
I was on the Complaints Panel or sorting through the complaints procedure before I was asked to step down. So you’ve got an idea of the ins and outs and the sort of issues going on. How long were you part of their Customer Panel?
With Accord almost a couple of years.
What would you say GreenSquareAccord’s strengths are?
I’m going to be honest. Their strengths, they’re good at lying and not carrying out repairs and they’re very, very good at taking rent arrears off people when they run into difficulties. You know, and I’m not taking the mick when I say that. There’s nothing particularly positive, and I’ve thought about this over the weekend, that I can say that they’re any good at. They’re good at not listening. They’re good at getting rent arrears and now they’re particularly good at creating an online social media, a GSA matrix where everything’s fantastic and everything’s got glitter on it and beautiful and ‘we are a wonderful organisation’ when in reality, it’s not, so those are the only things that I can think that they’re potentially good at, and sorry, you know, like I said, I’m not taking the mick but you know.
No, I appreciate that. It was the hypocrisy online in their social media posts which sort of spurred me into creating a website, they used to do a lot of hiding and celebrating on LinkedIn. Facebook, they would expect to receive negative comments. Twitter, they’d get away with it a bit more, and LinkedIn, they seemed to just shine, which is why I’ve gone across all three platforms.
I mean I browsed the webpage on Twitter. I’ve looked at it for weeks and there was some sort of Care Director that’s got an MBE and it’s been reposted loads of times and then you know, we’re doing this with, we’re building houses here, we’re doing that, and there’s pictures of Ruth Cook and I’m looking at it thinking well hang on a minute, are you a landlord or are you a property developer because it’s all very well bringing all these fantastic, you know pigsties and you know, energy efficient houses and saying ‘Oh you know, we’re at the forefront of stuff’. But when you’re neglecting your old stock and your tenants and you can’t even get repairs done and no-one picks the phones up at Customer First and we’re waiting on the phone for an hour and 45 minutes and they don’t actually do what you ask them to do, and you’ve got, like a lot of staff that have left since the merger and the staff that they replace them with are completely incompetent and haven’t got a clue what they’re doing, you know? So I think they should concentrate on investing repairs and maintaining their old stock. It’s almost like they’ve become like a corporate property developer, and rather actually like the core is gone from looking after tenants and the properties and building communities, it’s what they can get on social media and what money they can spend on new builds somewhere else and look nice and shiny and you know, happy go lucky in the housing sector world and it’s wrong to be quite honest.
I agree with you. It is a difficult line to tread, isn’t it because we do need new homes. There’s no doubt about that but whilst they’re not able to, as you say, maintain their property stock, we’re just creating future slums and that’s my big fear. We’re not addressing the problem.
I mean the problem is with it, I live in a block that’s twenty years old now and then neglected. I mean we used to get it painted every five years. They don’t do anything now. There’s repairs that need doing, it’s looking dilapidated after 20 years I mean you know. These new builds, they’re probably not going to be as good as older properties. I mean, what are they going to be like? And you know, do they just keep building new stock and then selling these off or just letting them go to the dogs and not do stuff because overall, when repairs aren’t tackled and buildings maintained, it’s going to cost them in the long run to be quite honest.
Or they’ll sell it off! My block of flats is I think 11 years old now and it’s looking incredibly run down and again, just through neglect. Do you think GreenSquareAccord treat you and their customers with respect and dignity?
No I don’t. Just the arrogant attitude on the phone. When you’ve got an issue, not necessarily a complaint, you’re just treated like a name and a number to be quite honest. You’re treated like a product, like in the supermarket and you’re only useful while you’re in date and that means to me, you’re in date if you’re paying your rent and you’re residing in that property.
Do you trust GreenSquareAccord?
No, no not with my experience with being told that things are going to be done when they don’t and misinformation, and they actually blatantly lied about a lot of things and I’ve got personal experience of that over 16 years. So no, there’s no trust there.
Did you trust Accord?
Far more than I do since the merger. Accord would be 60-70%, now it’s 100% like I’m dealing with skanks, like criminals at the end of the day.
This next question almost seems redundant but it was, has the merger improved service?
No I don’t think it has because you have now, with the call centre doing the same, you have to wait on the phone for an hour and 45 minutes. The staff are very nice on the phone and they take your details but then you don’t get emails back. Things are passed to people, where, you know, you’ve put a query in with your housing officer, you would get a response within a week or a few days. Now, I put a request in for, for something that’s going on in my block eight weeks ago. It’s now been two months. I’ve not even had a response, you know? It’s completely got to a level of astonishment. Now, our rent, we pay the organisation for a service, and you expect a certain standard. Nothing’s perfect and problems do occur, but the level of service now is atrocious, on all levels, with whatever you try to, whether it’s to complain about ASB or repair or you’re asking about something that’s going in the block, depending on the scheme. It’s gone really downhill.
if GreenSquareAccord are to become a simply brilliant landlord, what three areas should they focus on first?
Delivering on what they actually promise. Getting repairs done in the time that they state they get them done. Improving Customer First contact centre would be a great thing to do, like call waiting times, and actually training the staff so they know what they’re doing. Those are my main things, and actually, engaging with tenants and communities on a human level and not treating us like we’re some sort of commodity or like a bank transaction. You know, it’s like Accord used to call us tenants. Now GreenSquareAccord don’t like that, we’re customers. You know, I’m a real person. I feel like I’m kind of renting a property of Barclays Bank or some sort of financial institute. It doesn’t seem to be a heart or any emotional nicety in this organisation now. It’s, it just seems like the spirit and the heart has gone out of what used to be there years ago.
Unfortunately, it’s the same within any sort of small business, as they become bigger, they become more corporate and the customer, the resident, the individual, the commodity, it is becoming less and less human in their interactions, you become numbers, and unfortunately, I’ve seen this in many organisations and I think this is part of the problem that GreenSquareAccord are now facing, they haven’t got that focus on the human element, and these are our homes.
I mean I can understand your point with businesses, but when you come to the housing associations, we’re real people, real communities. I’m not, you know, I’m a member of Tpas, I know a lot of other people in other organisations and they don’t seem to be doing things like GreenSquareAccord. Far from it, quite honestly. I mean, you know, like engagements and stuff, making redundant the entire Engagement Department, dissolving the Complaint and Scrutiny Panels and then, you know, what came out of the meeting that yeah, we’re going to reformulate some sort of Better Together Panel in June or July, oh and by the way, we don’t want any of the existing panel members that had served for Accord for years on this new panel. So what does that tell you about their level of engagement and respect for tenants that have worked for years for nothing. So that just basically sums up what they’re about.
Do you feel these issues affecting us as GreenSquareAccord residents are the same other residents from other associations face?
Not particularly because I go to Scrutiny Club, I mean I should have gone to Scrutiny Club tonight but there’s no need now because there’s no Scrutiny Panel now. I’ve discussed this in training courses and I’ve discussed this not just with tenants, with housing directors, EDI staff, housing officers, housing managers and they don’t have these issues that we have. I’m not saying they’re all perfect and some of them don’t but over the past 12 months, some of the comments I’m having, because I’m quite vocal about things I’m passionate about, they, people are really really shocked in the way that we do stuff and how the panels have changed and we’ve not really done proper scrutiny under GreenSquareAccord and I did scrutiny for 12 and a half years with my local council so I’m well versed in how scrutiny should operate and I’ve done it for Accord for a few years and it’s everything just seems to be like modified and translated into what they want rather than what real grassroots scrutiny is about. I can tell you now that the amount of feedback I get back from other organisations that are really leading the way in engagement and doing community work, where Accord just seem to have regressed back 50, 60 years now. It’s 200 years, it’s very draconian and very outdated and they seem to be a very secular organisation. They don’t seem to know what a lot of other organisations in the U. K. are up to. They just seem to do their own thing and think that that’s fine, and it’s a bit like North Korean regime with people thinking in that country that they have a fantastic life and, and obviously, you know, the tenants that don’t engage and sit on panels and speak to other organisations think that maybe GreenSquareAccord is fantastic whereas some of us that work in Housing and have done scrutiny with other organisations and have had, you know, lived in properties under different landlords, know different, a different story, you know, know a different vision and future.
I agree and I’m always quite surprised and pleasantly surprised when I do come across other great housing associations online and the one that springs to mind time and time again is P. A. Housing and their, as you say, their community engagement seems to be second to none.
I was just about to say P. A. from Leicester. Some of the stuff they do is absolutely fantastic to be quite honest, you know, and they are really at the forefront. There’s a couple of P. A. people on my EDI panel that I sit on that, that do do a lot of stuff like that to be quite honest.
They’ve engage with me on Twitter and on LinkedIn, and I think they’re really good. So what is EDI? What’s that acronym?
Equality Diversity Inclusion.
So if you could move to another association, would you?
I would, but because I’m physically disabled, I’m in a downstairs flat, adapted for my spinal needs. If I could move, I’d be gone tom-, I’d be gone now. I would definitely move.
Which is heartbreaking because it’s your home.
I’ve been here for nearly 16 and a half years and it’s tragic how things have got to the point where we’re doing what we’re doing. You have the internet, what you’re doing on Facebook and my attitude and the characters of the people, you know, voices unheard.
It is one of the reasons I set up the website, so we could pull together as residents to share these stories and get them out there.
One thing I learned about GreenSquareAccord is that they don’t like exposure and they don’t like what happens when people tell it like it is.
So far I’ve had a threat of legal action. They’re now saying that I’m intimidating female junior members, yeah it’s just, hang on guys, you need to come forward and step up. Bullying doesn’t work. We’ve proven this time and time again.
And this is what they do. They try and shut down things, they just try and shut down the truth don’t they? Like I’ve said, they’re like Gestapo S. S. from the 1940s where they want specific information out for the public to see but they don’t want the dirty laundry being exposed.
You agreeing to do this interview is greatly appreciated. What would your advice to other GreenSquareAccord residents who also feel let down by GreenSquareAccord be?
I would be persistent in making your voice heard. So if you’ve got repairs that need doing, I would persist in being determined. I would, if there was something that I didn’t like or that there’s a problem with the tenancy or there was something that I was dissatisfied with, I would communicate that to them and expect a response. That’s what I personally think at the end of the day and I would also, as a tenant, if I’m unsatisfied, unhappy about things, express my opinion on social media because they don’t seem to like it. There’s not much more that I can say about that than be persistent, be determined and ask for help off people because there is a theme I’ve noticed over the past year though at Accord and this is not just for staff, Customer First, it’s locality managers, it’s all of them. There is this work ethics that they’ve got now that if people complain or they’ve got a problem, just ignore it because if you ignore it, people give up and get tired and they think oh sod that, I’m not going to complain about that, and too many people have done that so what happens is then that problem goes away. I think they feel that actually works if you just ignore letters or fob the people off, we can get away with it. So it’s about re-educating tenants, empowering tenants, letting them know that we actually pay for a service and our rents pay for those jobs and we expect a service and we expect people in those jobs to get the jobs done and be efficient. So it’s about persistence, determination and holding them to account. And the only way you do that is by engaging with them, and communicating your fears or if they’re doing something good, you know, complements, which doesn’t particularly happen to be quite honest. So that’s the only way and the only real way of doing it is by, you know, like you’ve set up a website. If I see disgruntled people on Twitter or other places going on about their landlord, or there were people in my block that have got problems, I sort of direct people in how to get a complaint in, what to say, and then if they need help getting it to an Ombudsman, because I’ve done it quite a few times now, I help people because some people haven’t got the grit and determination or wouldn’t know how to do things so it’s like be persistent, hold them to account, and that’s the only way. By doing what we’re doing, we might make them think well actually we really really need to start bucking our ideas up and taking residents and tenants and certain complaints seriously.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, you’ve got to be tenacious. You’ve got to keep going. Again, it’s why I set up this website as I know many residents who have just given up. They’ve just given up with it and as you say, GreenSquareAccord win at that point.
If you could have one message that you could put into the hands of the senior leadership team what would that message be Dave?
Is this to Ruth Cook?
To anyone you like on the senior leadership team.
Engage with your tenants, do your jobs, our rent pays for a standard of service and pays for your cushy company cars. Listen to the voice of the tenants, engage and you know, start showing the tenants some respect and dignity, and treat us like people as opposed to being fobbed off. We’re not numbers, we are tenants, we’re people, real people, and we have to live in these properties, you know, and do the right thing and that’s it really.
You’re a great man Dave and you’re great for all the work that you’re doing with your neighbours and thank you again for agreeing to this.
If you would like to have you say please get in touch, we are hear to listen and share.