How do you turn customer insight into action in social housing?

How did Gentoo turn complaints insight into action?

When Michael McGuigan joined Gentoo in April 2024, the complaints team was compliant but reactive, and the insight it captured "sat there" — siloed and underused. The fix was structural before it was technical. Gentoo created a customer committee in November 2023, with six members meeting every eight weeks, to hold the organisation to account. The complaints team was rebuilt as an independent "customer voice team": five stage-one complaint handlers (customer voice partners), a stage-two and Housing Ombudsman lead, and — created in June 2024 — a dedicated customer insight role. That insight role exists specifically to triangulate what customers say across complaints, TSMs and engagement, and to hand the root cause to the business area that owns it. The principle Michael repeats is "listen and act": insight only counts once a repairs or housing team has acted on it.

Why did Gentoo's complaints go up — and why is that good?

Counter-intuitively, rising complaint numbers were a sign of success. Gentoo delivered 7,000 hours of complaints-handling and customer-excellence training to frontline colleagues over the financial year, which meant complaints were correctly identified and logged rather than quietly handled as service requests. So stage-one complaints rose — while service requests stabilised, showing the training had embedded. The more telling movement was downstream: stage-two complaints fell sharply (a year earlier, three to four-fifths of stage-one complaints escalated to stage two; that dropped dramatically), and Housing Ombudsman determinations decreased substantially. Michael attributes this to richer stage-one conversations and a governance step where every stage-one response letter is reviewed before it goes out. The lesson for the sector: a higher complaint count paired with fewer escalations and fewer ombudsman cases is a healthier signal than a suspiciously low number.

What role does Power BI play in Gentoo's customer voice work?

Power BI is the plumbing that made insight usable. Before, everything was managed in Excel spreadsheets — slow, manual, and hard to share. Gentoo moved complaints and TSM reporting into Power BI and, crucially, rolled out real-time self-serve dashboards to the repairs senior leadership team, who can now dip in at any point in the day to see complaint numbers and customer sentiment for their own area. Michael calls this "a bit of a game changer", but is clear the dashboard was only half the job: the other half was an education piece — helping leaders understand what to look at and what to do with it. The compliance Power BI build let the team shift from reactive to proactive, and the same data now feeds quarterly reporting into the customer committee and the executive team, creating what Michael calls a "golden thread" through Gentoo's governance.

How did culture change drive Gentoo's results?

Michael is emphatic that "culture is key to all of the work that we're doing." The central shift was reframing complaints from a "dirty word" — the team "where it goes wrong" — into an opportunity to learn and improve collaboratively. A year on, he describes colleagues and senior leaders "knocking on our door wanting insight", an appetite that did not exist before. The supporting moves were deliberate: "brilliant conversations" each quarter with goals instead of objectives, aligned all the way back to strategy; a CARE service model (Clear, Assured, Respectful, Empathetic) embedded through the training; an independent customer voice team that reports directly to an executive director; and a well-being-designed team space. The payoff showed up culturally too — Gentoo achieved its first Great Place to Work accreditation, with Michael's own complaints team scoring 100%, on what he openly admits is not an easy topic to work in.

What did Gentoo achieve — and what comes next?

Gentoo holds a C1 consumer grade, which Michael frames carefully: "C1 is the minimum you would expect", achieved because the governance and foundations are in place — not a reason to rest. On TSMs, overall satisfaction finished the last financial year around 78% and reached roughly 80% at the end of Q3, with the trajectory moving in the right direction quarter on quarter; Michael repeatedly cautions that TSM scores move "like turning an oil tanker" and are best read over three to five years. What comes next is more outreach and more depth: a mobile community unit (a bus or van) to reach seldom-heard customers, TPAS accreditation with a scrutiny plan for the year, and the next chapter of the data work — a proof of concept with Wordnerds whose in-depth report landed the morning of the webinar, with Pete and the Wordnerds team booked in on 17 June to take Gentoo's exec team through it.

Full Webinar Transcript

Sarah Wilson: Thank you so much for joining. We're super excited about this one — I think it's one of our best yet. No pressure, Michael. It's all about insight to action, all the things you care about: complaints, standards and the TSM. So we're going for some big ones today.

For today's webinar, you've got me. I'm the account manager, and today I'm flying solo — I've got rid of my coworkers and I'm doing it by myself, which is my favourite kind of webinar. And then I've asked Michael to join us — Michael McGuigan, the Customer Voice Manager at Gentoo. Gentoo are a newly joined Wordnerds customer, and as part of the initiation we make you all do webinars, so this is Michael's turn.

Just in case there are some newbies on the call: we are a customer feedback tool, and we help you with the structuring and analysing of all of your customer feedback. We are social housing experts — we've worked in the social housing space for around four years now, we've got around 20 housing associations on the books, and we also work across other sectors: financial services, retail, and travel and hospitality. What that means is we can take all of their best practices in CX and bring them back to housing.

For today's agenda: I'm going to set the scene and talk you through how we got to this webinar and why we decided to do it. Then I'll hand over to Michael, who'll take you through the journey of the last 12 months — what he's done to get to this point, and what he's looking at for the future, the next chapter for Gentoo. And we're going to leave loads of time for Q&A — at least 20 minutes at the end. Pop your questions in the chat and we'll have a dedicated section where we put them up on screen, or come off mute if you'd rather. We try to make these as interactive as possible.

Sarah Wilson: In terms of setting the scene — current challenges in social housing. It's been a year now since the introduction of the new social housing regime, and there's real reflection across the sector about how it's changed the way you conduct business and engage with customers. There's a feeling it's become a bit more business as usual. We were at the Tenant, Resident and Engagement conference last week and heard directly from the regulator that it's becoming a lot more ingrained in everyday business life.

At the start, it was really difficult to get to grips with the regulation changes — consumer standards, the TSMs, regulatory returns, inspections, and the grading system. It's been a steep learning curve, reflected in the numerous C3 and C4 gradings. But we've also seen some providers attain the highest levels of tenant satisfaction and consumer grades, and a lot of the gradings being awarded have been C1s and C2s. What's clear is that it's very much a journey, and there's a desperate need for that one version of the truth. The TSM is sitting around 70% satisfaction across the industry overall, but there are lots of pressure pockets, and they should really be viewed as sources of intelligence.

The conditions have been set for improvements to be made. The next year, and the year after that, are all about seeing and tracking these trends and using insight to make and measure improvements. So why join this webinar? It's all about turning your insight into action. You already know the top issues in your data sets — repairs, communications — but it's about seeing how the sentiment around those issues has changed over time, what the trends are, how that crosses against your metadata, and how specific actions can drive positive and negative change. It's about setting you in the driving seat for positive change in your business. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Michael.

Michael McGuigan: Good morning everyone. Today I'm going to talk through our customer compliance journey here at Gentoo over the last 12 months — some of the service improvements and the approach we've taken, how we've moved insight and learning into action from siloed working, and the skills programmes and how we've grown and developed our culture to have a positive impact on colleagues and customers.

First, a little about Gentoo for those who don't know us. Our core purpose is to provide safe and decent homes for our customers here in Sunderland and Washington in the North East, for today and tomorrow. Our values were created by our colleagues — we asked them about 18 months ago what they wanted Gentoo's values to be. Our vision is to provide great homes, strong communities, and inspired people for Sunderland. We've got six priorities: we know our customer, we help our communities to thrive, we provide great homes, we're a great place to work, we're well governed, and we spend our money wisely.

A bit about Gentoo by the numbers: we've got 28,500 homes, 60,000 customers, about 1,100 colleagues, and 75% of those live in the Sunderland area. We have a 22.3% overall operating margin, which is really good. Our stock condition data is up to date, 98% complete. We spend over a million pounds a week investing in our existing properties — which sounds a lot, but we've got an ageing housing stock, so that money is spent wisely to maintain it. Our overall TSM customer satisfaction finished the last financial year on 78%. We have £177 million turnover, with a £12.1 million surplus. We handle 430,000-plus customer calls a year, and we supported customers with an additional £1.9 million in income through our money matters team, including a £41,800 crisis fund with 802 customers referred to it.

Michael McGuigan: Now to our journey. It all began towards the end of 2023. I joined Gentoo in April of last year, and the work started before that. We had a complaints team that were compliant, but there were opportunities to improve. We had quite a reactive culture, and we created a customer committee in November 2023 to hold us to account for what we do every day — six members who meet every eight weeks. I present to the customer committee on complaints, TSMs, engagement and insight, and I'm quite rightly challenged, which is great.

We brought accountability into the complaints team. We call it the customer voice team, and we have a structure of five stage-one complaints handlers — advisors we call customer voice partners — and a customer complaint lead who manages our stage-two complaints and our Housing Ombudsman cases. Historically there was a lot of silo learning and silo working: the customer voice team captured a lot of insight but didn't quite know what to do with it, so it sat there within the team. There was an opportunity to learn, but we didn't maximise it. We've moved on leaps and bounds since the end of 2023.

As we moved into Q1 and Q2 of last year, we delivered new complaints-handling training to all frontline colleagues — that equated to 7,000 hours of training over the financial year. We introduced new complaints reporting and brought in Power BI; previously everything was managed in Excel spreadsheets. We had our social housing regulator in to do a deep dive on complaints as part of our regulatory inspection, around April or May last year, where we invited customer committee and involved customers to meet the regulator — and then we left the room so the regulator could speak with our customers in private. We also invited the Housing Ombudsman in at the start of last year for our customers to meet them and talk through any issues. Being open and transparent started to change the culture, and the internal view of managing complaints.

We became a lot more transparent. We weren't just the complaints team sitting on a floor somewhere — we proactively reached out to colleagues across the business to share what our customers were telling us at an early point. The customer voice team also does a lot of engagement work; we have an engagement lead, and we run customer community voice meetings every quarter where customers discuss what's happening in their community, with representatives from housing and repairs there. We're also conscious of the seldom-heard — the voices we don't see regularly — so we launched informal drop-in sessions in the evening, out in local community centres rather than a Gentoo building. They went really well, were observed by our involved customer group, and after that pilot we rolled them out across our areas.

Last year was the first year of our annual complaints and service improvement plan. We delivered all of the roughly 15 actions we said we would, and it's tracked on the Gentoo website. We brought in new roles — a customer complaints lead, and a customer insight role — because we knew we had all this insight bottlenecked within the team, and we wanted to take that insight to action and triangulate what customers were telling us across complaints, engagement and TSMs. That insight role let us accelerate our Power BI dashboards. We introduced a new governance framework and a quality check process, and we passed an external audit with substantial assurance.

In Q3 and Q4 we took it a step further, going out to different business areas — repairs and maintenance, housing — to build collaboration and stronger partnerships across Gentoo. Our complaints have actually gone up, and I'll explain why. With the 7,000 hours of training around customer excellence and complaints handling, we've made sure that any customer who wishes to make a complaint has it captured and reported as such. So our complaints numbers have gone up, but that's not a bad thing — it shows we're recognising a complaint when we see it and acting on it. We've also rolled out self-serve complaints insight using Power BI to our repairs senior leadership team, so in real time they can understand complaint numbers and customer sentiment for their area. It's been welcomed with open arms, and part of that was the education piece — what is the MI I need to look at, and what do I do with it to deliver improved performance?

We've embedded "brilliant conversations" as part of our culture change. Each colleague has a quarterly brilliant conversation where we have goals instead of objectives, aligned right back to our strategy so everyone is pulling in the same direction for our customers. We introduced the Great Place to Work survey as a pilot last February to get a pulse check, and I'm pleased to say we completed the full survey in November and were successfully accredited as a Great Place to Work for the first time at Gentoo. I'll drop in that my own team achieved 100% — I was really proud of that, particularly because complaints is not an easy subject to work in, and the team have been on a real journey. As part of the new MI reporting, we've triangulated all of our customer sentiment and data to deliver improvements for customers and colleagues, and we've streamlined processes purely through what our customers are telling us.

Sarah Wilson: Unbelievable, Michael — thank you, and congratulations on the Great Place to Work, that's an amazing achievement. Your slides are so visually appealing too.

Michael McGuigan: That's the great comms change — I'm not going to take credit for that.

Sarah Wilson: We've had every technical difficulty we could have had today.

Michael McGuigan: I deliberately moved the numbers slides further down the presentation, because one of the things I noticed when I joined Gentoo a year ago was that we were quite focused on the number, more so than what the customer was telling us. As we transition on our journey with complaints, engagement and insight, the number is important — but what our customers are telling us is more important. For example, this week I went into the repairs managers' and senior leadership team training, and I pulled up a numbers slide, but I didn't dwell on the numbers — I talked about a customer's experience from last week. It wasn't a complaint, it was their experience of engaging with Gentoo, and that resonated more than talking about a number.

From the Q3 numbers, our service requests are stable, which tells me the training we delivered last year has embedded — we're now correctly identifying what is a complaint and what is a service request. Our stage-one complaints have increased, a reflection of that. But interestingly, our stage-two complaints have reduced significantly. About a year ago, three to four-fifths of stage-one complaints were resulting in a stage-two complaint. We've invested heavily in the customer voice team, delivered advanced complaints training and the CARE model and customer excellence training, and we're now having a richer conversation with the customer at stage one — understanding what's gone wrong and taking the appropriate action. That's seen a huge drop in customers who remain dissatisfied and ask to move to the next stage. The governance framework, where every stage-one response letter is reviewed, has also reduced stage-two cases.

We've had an increase in MP and councillor enquiries — that's pretty stable and I'm not concerned about it, though it's disappointing if a customer feels they have to reach out to a councillor or MP because they're not getting resolution from Gentoo. Our Housing Ombudsman determinations have decreased substantially over the last financial year, because we're getting it right at stage one. Compensation has gone up slightly — that's because we're now awarding it more fairly, appropriate to the service failure, and in conjunction with the business area responsible. On TSM for complaints, we finished Q3 on 40; that's always a tricky one, like turning an oil tanker. The regulator themselves say you need to look at three, four, five years of TSM results to understand the picture. So for me it's not being reactive to the TSM score — it's maintaining the path you're on and having confidence the direction is right. We've got 38 stage-one extensions agreed, all in agreement with the customer, and none for stage twos, which is great.

Sarah Wilson: I'd love to know how this compares to other housing associations. Is there a metric here you're proud of, Michael?

Michael McGuigan: In Gentoo's world our split is 70/30 — 70% of customers are contacted by telephone, 30% digitally, and we use a third-party provider to serve our customers for TSM results. The metric I'm proudest of is complaints, because that's my vested interest — but overall, the 80% overall satisfaction at the end of Q3. We had a big dip in Q1 of the last financial year, and quarter by quarter the trajectory has gone the right way, those numbers have gone back up. That shows the culture change and shift we've developed, and the insight we're now using to drive improvements. Colleagues are invested and committed, and we're much more customer-focused than we've ever been — though, as I said, it's like turning an oil tanker to move those results quickly.

Sarah Wilson: The overall score generally sits around the 71% mark, so it feels like you've made really big gains. It sounds like it's all about the culture and the initiatives you've put in place.

Michael McGuigan: Culture is key to all the work we're doing — you can see it and feel it. I walk into the repairs department now and people are interested in what we're doing within customer voice; I didn't see that a year ago. Historically the complaints team was "where it goes wrong", and I've been changing that mindset. Yes, sometimes it goes wrong, and sometimes it goes horribly wrong — but it's an opportunity to learn, to improve, to work more collaboratively and not make the same mistake again. There's that appetite and willingness across the group now, which is phenomenal to see.

Michael McGuigan: One of the key things, alongside culture change, has been governance around complaints. We introduced a quality assurance framework: each stage-two response is pulled together as a pack covering the whole complaint from stage one to stage two, then goes to a senior leader — a head of or director in that business function — to review and check we've done everything we can. The final sign-off of the stage-two response letter is from an exec director in that business area before we release it to the customer. We've also got our compliance Power BI — that's been a key shift, especially the real-time performance dashboards for business areas to self-serve. It's been a game changer. We have quarterly reporting into customer committee — I was there yesterday giving the end-of-year update on complaints, TSMs and the work we're doing with Wordnerds — and I report quarterly into the exec team too. So we've got that golden thread running through all our governance and committees.

We have our member responsible for complaints, Morvin, who regularly comes in and spends time with the team, and was involved in creating our annual complaints service improvement plan. We've developed an internal SharePoint site on our intranet that ties back to the Housing Ombudsman Spotlight Reports — for example, there was a really good spotlight report on damp and mould, and we've done our own case studies on damp and mould within Gentoo. We take the learning from the Ombudsman spotlight reports, our deep dives and our case studies to improve. We regularly do complaint deep-dive reviews — we've just reviewed our acknowledgement and response letters to make sure they're empathetic, jargon-free and in plain English, and our customers have reviewed and signed those off too. As part of the customer excellence training delivered through those 7,000 hours, we introduced the CARE model — being Clear, Assured, Respectful and Empathetic.

Sarah Wilson: It's absolutely gold — I could be here all afternoon. I love what you were saying about the culture within the business, and the environment you create for the team doing a very challenging job.

Michael McGuigan: The customer voice team are independent from the rest of the business — I report directly into an exec director, so we're transparent, clear and not biased toward any business area. Where the team sit, we've created a well-being area: we've introduced plants, a soft area, a free tuck shop. I've tried to design the layout to be professional, because we're a professional team, but also relaxed, with opportunities to take a breather, because it can be a challenging role. It's also a space to sit, chat and brainstorm. That's all contributed to our Great Place to Work.

Sarah Wilson: You mentioned turnover has been really low as well, which contributes to the team feeling like one big family.

Michael McGuigan: We've got a bit of a mantra going — every time something great happens, a member of the team will say "hashtag Great Place to Work". We've got good camaraderie, a strong, professional team, and we brought in the new roles we needed to deliver this and get to where we are now. As part of the customer voice team we have an engagement lead, part of that triangulation of customer insight and sentiment. We're also working with TPAS at the moment — in December we reached out and started the accreditation process and self-assessment, which we did in a slightly unique way: we invited customers and colleagues in for a day's training on the self-assessment. We had our second conversation this Tuesday, and TPAS delivered scrutiny training to our customer committee and involved customers last week, which was fantastic. We've got a robust scrutiny plan for this financial year, and on the customer engagement maturity model we've placed ourselves between progressive and mature — so we know we've got work to do, and TPAS will support us.

Sarah Wilson: It's not all been smooth sailing, has it? You've had plenty of challenges along the way — it'd be great to touch on some of those in the Q&A.

Michael McGuigan: A bit more on learning and recommendations. For us it's been about moving insight into action. Culture is key, but you've got to have the foundations: good, robust, trustworthy data, your processes, the governance, and the right people in the right roles to start with. Skills and development is key, and we've done a lot of that across Gentoo over the last 12 months, alongside the triangulation of insight from complaints, TSMs and engagement. We look at the root cause, we take action, and business areas own that. Engagement is key — the drop-ins have really moved the dial, and very soon we'll have a mobile unit, a bus or van, visiting communities around the Gentoo area to reach the seldom-heard. The complaints team will be on there, along with housing and repairs — we'll be a one-stop shop.

Improvements in TSMs take time, but we're seeing them come through. It's all about empowering colleagues, which takes you right back to culture, because it's the colleagues doing the job who often have the answer. Part of our culture shift is "listen and act" — there's no bad decision, no wrong decision; it's all about learning and moving forward. We've got a C1 rating, which was fantastic to achieve, because we've got all the governance in place — but C1 is the minimum you would expect. So we're already making sure everything we do continues that journey, and we're ready for our next regulatory inspection to demonstrate to the regulator that we've listened, we've acted, and we're going the extra mile.

Sarah Wilson: Right on time, and incredible — almost like we planned it. A massive thank you to Michael; I feel like I've learned so much. We've had some amazing questions, so you're not quite done yet. We'll pop the poll up while questions come in. Michael touched on the fact that they're C1, but Gentoo don't rest on their laurels — it's all about improvement at whatever stage of the journey you're at.

So, lots of questions around the structure of the team and how you operate. First one: do your customer voice team have to go to business teams for investigation data, or are systems open for them to access independently?

Michael McGuigan: We do have systems the team can access as part of their investigation, but I encourage the team to go and speak to colleagues around the business — being a North East social landlord, our colleagues are often in the next building or a Teams chat away. Historically they would have just looked at systems to form a view; now it's important we do both.

Sarah Wilson: Who deals with service requests — the frontline teams or the complaints team?

Michael McGuigan: Anybody who has that interaction with the customer: if they can own it, fix it or resolve the service request there and then, the expectation is that they will. However, the complaints team tracks and monitors every service request and audits them to make sure they're genuine, and that any outstanding actions have been fulfilled.

Sarah Wilson: Are the TSM scores you showed a rolling average?

Michael McGuigan: No, those are from our quarterly reporting, not a rolling average — though this financial year we are looking at that, particularly for overall satisfaction. As I said in the presentation, quarter on quarter the score has gone up, but they're quarterly scores, not rolling. Our 2024/25 scores were presented to board and customer committee yesterday, so I couldn't share them today.

Sarah Wilson: Do you ask any additional questions in the survey around complaints and complaint handling?

Michael McGuigan: Yes. We've got the question asked in relation to the TSM complaint question, but throughout all our TSMs we look for other factors too. If a customer mentions damp and mould during a survey response, that's automatically flagged direct to the repairs team's mailbox to investigate, because it might not have been reported before. We'd want to be proactive and reach out to check everything's okay, or to come and have a look. There are a couple of other prompts in there that send us alerts to take action.

Sarah Wilson: It sounds like you're really good at triangulating the different sources. What about compensation — have you increased it at stage one, and do you have a specific compensation framework?

Michael McGuigan: I presented a revised compensation policy to customer committee yesterday, which was approved. Compensation has increased at stage one, but with parameters: our compensation matrix sets a maximum level the customer voice team can authorise, and anything above that — say above £50 — is decided with the business area responsible for the failure, as well as the complaints manager, so we apportion it correctly. It has gone up, but it's now stabilised, and I think we did need to increase it from where we were a year ago.

Sarah Wilson: So, one about Wordnerds now — brilliant progress. Can you tell us more about the Wordnerds piece and the next challenges you're looking to tackle using insights?

Michael McGuigan: It's been exciting to work with Wordnerds. We've come to the end of our proof of concept phase, and we had that report emailed across this morning, so it's hot off the press — I haven't had time to digest it yet. But Pete and the team are coming in on the 17th of June, where we'll meet with our exec team, go through the report and look at our way forward and next steps. From what I've glanced at, it's very in-depth and thorough, and that takes us to the next level. We've done everything in-house for the last twelve months, and a lot of that required manual intervention — it's been time-consuming. We're excited to be doing this proof of concept with Wordnerds; it's a game changer.

Sarah Wilson: Brilliant, thanks for the shout-out. And if you're listening and thinking this sounds like something you'd want to be involved in, I'll share information after the call about next steps and how to do a similar piece of work yourselves — it's all very non-salesy, as you can probably tell.

Michael McGuigan: And for us the other bonus was that you're based in Sunderland, so we kept it in the North East.

Sarah Wilson: Pete's based in Sunderland — I'm very much on the other side of the river. I'd be really interested to hear what you look for as part of your quality assurance for complaints.

Michael McGuigan: We've got about a 15-checkpoint checklist for quality assurance on complaints, ranging from the acknowledgement letter through the end-to-end process — that first point of contact with the customer, checking systems have been updated correctly, checking the investigation's been carried out correctly. I'm more than happy to share what we look for from a best-practice perspective. It's all built into SharePoint and automated, so there's no paperwork. When it gets to the outcome of the quality assurance, the colleague automatically receives an email to say it's been quality assured, with positive, constructive feedback alongside it. From a governance perspective, we can demonstrate that's part of our process.

Sarah Wilson: I've fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole on the Gentoo site — there's absolutely tons of information and frameworks, the most depth I've seen. Can you explain the insight advisor role, and would you mind sharing the job description?

Michael McGuigan: The insight advisor role was created in June last year. I've worked at other housing associations before, where you'd have your complaints team, and that was it — customer insight would be over here somewhere, engagement somewhere else. For us to take all that rich customer information and improve outcomes, it was important to have an insight role that sat within the customer voice team. As I said, we had lots of customer data but didn't quite know what to do with it, or have time to, because complaints is quite a niche role. The advisor role started that journey of triangulation, moving us toward a customer insight team with a complaints arm attached, rather than purely a complaints team. It's part of the culture shift too: rather than complaints being a dirty word, a year later we've had so many colleagues and senior leaders knocking on our door wanting insight — there's a huge appetite to know more. There's a danger with that, so we have to present it the right way, rather than sending people down a rabbit hole or panicking them. It's early days for that role, but we needed it in place to start using insight more effectively.

Sarah Wilson: That person reports into you, and you report directly into the CEO?

Michael McGuigan: The team structure at the minute: a customer engagement lead, the customer insight advisor, and the customer complaint lead all report directly into me. The rest of the team report into the customer complaints lead, and I report directly into an exec director.

Sarah Wilson: We've had a comment from Yorkshire Housing — not so much a question, but interesting. At Yorkshire Housing they have 18,000 homes and get around 130 to stage one and around 40 to stage two. So less stock, but a lot more complaints. I think that speaks to the service-request distinction we talked about — it's really difficult to get an overall comparative picture. What do you think?

Michael McGuigan: That was one of the things I needed to get right when I joined last April. From a service-request perspective, I needed the reassurance and the governance check that what we had as a service request was genuinely a service request, what we had as a complaint was genuinely a complaint, and that all complaints identified were treated as such. I've got that reassurance now. I wouldn't be too concerned at 130 stage-one complaints — I'd start to dissect it and do some root-cause analysis to see if any were potential service requests. But that's a great opportunity, and it wouldn't worry me.

Sarah Wilson: A really good one from Becky: in surveys, we find that if a customer is unhappy with the outcome of the complaint, they report being unhappy with the handling, even when we feel the service was good. When surveying, do you ask further questions to distinguish handling from outcome?

Michael McGuigan: A very good question. From all the governance we've got in place, I have the assurance that, from a complaints-handling perspective, we've got it right — we've tightened up so much over the last year, we're 100% compliant, and we're delivering a more professional, quality service. But sometimes on the back of a service issue — outstanding follow-on repairs, things still to be completed — that can affect what customers tell us about the complaints score. If I looked at the surveys in isolation, I could think we're not doing something right in handling complaints. But bringing all the insight together, I know we've got a robust complaints process that delivers — and I also know customers are sometimes unhappy on the back of the service, which isn't necessarily about how the complaint was handled, but about what the complaint was really about in the first place. It's back to that triangulation.

Sarah Wilson: That makes perfect sense. The regulator said at the conference last week that there probably will be changes at some point — not now, but in the next few years — around the wording of the questions and how that breaks down. We've got two more questions: was your complaints-handling training delivered by a third party or in-house?

Michael McGuigan: Third party, but we co-created it. We co-created the complaints training for repairs, the customer excellence training for the rest of the frontline colleagues, and the advanced complaints training for the complaints team. Rather than delivering that in one session, we did it over three, to keep the story and journey alive — and after each session the team were given a bit of homework. It strengthened the team's performance, but we also looked at insights, characters and behaviours within the team, so it was a journey of self-discovery for those individuals as well. We did it over a three-month period.

Sarah Wilson: Last one: how many customers currently make up the customer committee, and is it quite a diverse group?

Michael McGuigan: There are six customers on the customer committee, one of whom is also a Gentoo board member. They're a diverse group, they hold us to account, and they've been in place just over a year. They challenge respectfully — and that's what's needed, because we're here for the customer. If they didn't challenge, I'd be disappointed; their views count, and they've had lots of training over the last year so they can scrutinise in more depth.

Sarah Wilson: What a nice note to end on. That was absolutely fantastic — thank you so much, we can't thank you enough. The roughly 65 people who joined will have been really enlightened by what you've shared. We'll share the slides and the recording, and we'll take some of the comments from the chat into more detail. Thank you so much for your time, Michael — we'll be back for our next one. Thanks so much, everybody.

Michael McGuigan: Bye.