Customer and community engagement policy
This policy outlines how we'll engage with our customers and communities, including things like gathering feedback and providing opportunities to help shape our services.
Introduction
For Magna, customer and community engagement means working closely with our customers, communities, and stakeholders in areas where we own and manage properties to improve services to our customers and local communities.
Customer and community engagement will help us to achieve our strategic priority of customer experience - right service, right time, first time.
What is Customer and Community Engagement?
Customer engagement describes:
- All the activities and processes that we undertake to help us understand our customers' opinions and what our customers want;
- All the activities we encourage and resources we provide that enable customers to be involved in Magna's work, if they want to;
- How we work with our communities and stakeholders including local MPs, police, and local charities to understand the issues facing our communities as well as the opportunities to work together and improve.
Involved customers
'Involved customers' describes those customers who regularly engage with us and whose views and involvement we regularly seek eg mystery shoppers, scrutiny group etc.
Our partners and stakeholders
Our partners and stakeholders include local authorities, the police and fire services, county, town and parish councils, health services, schools and colleges, other housing providers and voluntary and community organisations.
Our core local authority areas are those administered by Somerset Council and Dorset Council. We'll concentrate our community and stakeholder involvement efforts in our core areas, where our presence and impact is most effective.
Our customer involvement framework
We want to strengthen our customer voice through effective engagement and involvement so our customers will feel listened to.
We'll make service and investment decisions based on customer feedback. We'll encourage our customer to provide feedback and share the outcomes.
We'll ensure that we clearly understand who we need to talk with for any involvement exercise and specifically target these customers, or a representative group which can speak on their behalf.
When we welcome new customers, we will offer them the opportunity to get involved with Magna. We'll offer a number of ways for our customers to get involved to ensure our membership is diverse and refreshed on a regular basis and to ensure that we are inclusive to all customers.
We'll adopt clear principles for our involvement which outline our approach and the ambitions we have for this important activity. We'll offer different levels of involvement for our customers depending on their preferences and the subject area. We'll have clear involvement standards which our colleagues will meet and our customers can measure us against.
We'll develop a comprehensive toolkit for our colleagues to help them undertake effective involvement to the appropriate standard and in line with how Magna wants this to be done. We'll build the skills and abilities of our colleagues and customers to undertake the involvement effectively through a competency framework.
We'll make sure that customers are aware of the difference their involvement has made and use both direct and indirect channels to let them know.
Community and stakeholder engagement
In our core operating areas we'll help promote social, environmental, and economic well-being.
Occasionally our role may put us in conflict with the local community. In these situations, we'll take time to explain the reasons for our decisions and, where it's possible, to modify or adapt our plans to take account of this community feedback.
How do we get involved?
Supporting local authorities and strategic partnerships in our core areas
We work at all levels with relevant partners and stakeholders to influence how local services are provided to better meet the needs of our customers and the wider community.
We'll support strategic partnerships and housing forums in our core areas of operation.
Support customers and communities
We work with customers to help maintain and improve areas where we own or manage properties.
Promoting Magna
We provide a variety of housing-related services which benefit the wider community. We publish relevant policies, procedures and service standards on community involvement on our website.
We have colleagues to help involve customers and to promote Magna in the community where we own property, maintain and improve the neighbourhoods where we have properties, and work with customers and other stakeholders to support community projects and initiatives that benefit Magna and its customers.
Measuring the impact of community and stakeholder involvement
We'll measure the impact of community and stakeholder engagement by:
- Obtaining partners' views about what we do and the differences we've made;
- Assessing the impact of community events by listening to what people tell us, giving feedback on what we've done and assessing the difference it has made;
- Assessing the impact that community improvements carried out using the community improvement fund have had on customers; and
- Regular reporting of our performance against our service standards.
Value for money (VfM)
Magna's customer and community engagement activity will be reviewed regularly. We'll ensure we're focusing on the right areas to achieve the best outcomes for Magna, our customers and relevant partners and stakeholders.