It is extraordinary to think that it is only three months to Christmas and I have had the pleasure of being in post for nine months already. Whilst the time has flown by it has been an extremely busy and active nine months.
We have launched the information sheet to give people looking for a home the basic information on leasehold and what it means. This will be handed out by estate agents when prospective purchasers first attend. We have worked very hard to get this paper together and we are still debating whether some further tweaks are necessary.
Having seen the initial reaction to the leaflet it is prompting us to look at specific guides for retirement homes, shared ownership and leaseholders who have bought their homes.
Other initiatives will be unveiled as we move forward and seek to present a more customer focussed user friendly website and service. I am hugely proud of the service we have delivered over the past 21 years but if we don’t keep evolving we will fall short on meeting needs.
There are a number of areas that will benefit. For instance we have already invested to deliver a much improved search service for Tribunal cases. We are making sure that as we redesign the website we make the content far more accessible and user friendly.
We have had comment about the wordy nature of some parts of the website and we will work to make the information clean and clear and simply presented. Of course with any website it is subjective as to look and layout. I would suspect that you look at many sites and think “that could be better presented” or “I wish it were easier to get around”. Well I am sure we won’t please all the people all the time but we will certainly endeavour to please as many as we can.
It won’t be quick to see the changes come through but you should see the evolution of the service move forward and improve our services. Of course the real measure of the changes will be when we see the waiting time on the phones get to a reasonable wait. Helping more online and delivering clear and easy to understand information will aid that.
