Customer and community engagement policy

‘Engaged customers’ are customers who volunteer their time to give feedback and work with us to shape, influence and co-create the services we provide.

Examples of customer engagement:

• We provide opportunities for customers to take part in activities and processes to help us understand our customers’ opinions and what our customers want;
• We work with our communities and stakeholders, including local MPs, police, and local charities, to understand the issues facing our communities as well as opportunities to work together and improve.
• Our online platform, Magna Voice, offers many ways for customers to give their views
• We will provide customers with a Menu of Engagement opportunities via our framework document.

Our Customer Engagement Framework

Our Customer Engagement Framework explains how we involve customers in shaping, influencing and co-creating the services they receive.

It provides clear principles for meaningful, inclusive and accessible engagement, ensuring customers can take part in ways that suit their needs and interests.

There are different levels of involvement options, from sharing feedback to deeper co-creation. This helps us offer a range of opportunities, from light touch participation to more active roles, depending on what matters most to each customer.

It also strengthens how we use customer insight, making sure we embed learning from complaints and Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM), maintain visible feedback loops, and demonstrate how customer voices directly inform decisions.

This supports a transparent, consistent and high-quality approach to engagement and reflects our commitment to delivering services that align with customer priorities.

Our customer and community engagement policy

Our commitment to listening to and learning from our customers

We’re committed to ensuring that customers are at the heart of our decision-making. We want to strengthen our customers’ voice through meaningful engagement and involvement, so they feel genuinely listened to and empowered to influence the services they receive. We’ll do this by:
 

• Making service and investment decisions based on customer feedback, ensuring their views directly inform how we plan, deliver, and improve our services.
• Engaging with customers at an early stage to ensure any feedback starts at the beginning of the journey.
• Providing clear and easy to understand information.
• Actively encouraging our customers to provide feedback, including from lived experience, and share the outcomes, demonstrating how we have listened and learnt to shape decisions.
• Ensuring that we involve relevant customers in each piece of research, targeting those directly affected.
• Promoting customer engagement to new customers so they’re aware of the benefits of sharing their views and the ways to engage with us from the start.
• Providing a variety of ways for our customers to engage to ensure the research and feedback we gather is diverse, inclusive, and relevant.
• Making sure we offer opportunities to get involved and engage on all of the services we provide.
• Having clear principles for customer engagement which explains our approach and ambitions, ensuring honesty, consistency and transparency across all engagement activities.
• Offering different levels of engagement based on customer preferences and the relevance of the subject, enabling flexible and meaningful participation.
• Having clear standards that guide our colleagues to deliver consistent and meaningful engagement and empower our customers to hold us to account. These standards will help to embed a culture of listening, learning, and acting on customer insight across Magna. They will be visible, measurable, and aligned with our values, ensuring that customer engagement is a core part of how we work.
• Engaging with customers on our annual TSM results.
• Ensuring customers are aware of the impact their involvement has made. We’ll communicate this through a variety of ways, including our website, social media, the Magna Voice platform, and Opendoor, our customer magazine.

• Building the skills and capabilities of our colleagues to understand how to engage with customers.

Gathering research and insight

Magna Voice is our online community platform for customer research and insight. It’s designed to help us better understand our customers and improve services based on their feedback.

It supports real-time engagement, allowing us to quickly gather and analyse customer views and experiences through discussions and consultations that take place on the platform. This will help us to co-create services that are inclusive, relevant, and tailored to our customers’ needs.

Magna Voice helps us to engage more meaningfully, with digitally active customers, and improve satisfaction by shaping services that reflect what matters most to them.

The platform supports our compliance with the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard, ensuring customer voices are heard and acted upon in decision-making.

Magna Voice is aligned with our Better Futures strategy, helping us to deliver better outcomes for customers, communities, and colleagues.

Performance of Magna Voice is reviewed annually, with regular reporting on engagement metrics and impact.

We welcome feedback from all customers, including colleagues who live in our homes. Their experiences and insights are equally valuable and will be considered as part of our customer engagement and research activities, provided they are contributing as a customer.

While Magna Voice is a key tool for engagement, we’ll continue to offer non-digital ways to get involved, such as in-person events, and provide paper copies of surveys where required, to ensure everyone has a chance to share their views and influence our services.

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
• voluntary and community organisations.

Community and stakeholder engagement

We’ll help to promote social, environmental, and economic well-being in the areas where we have homes.

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 possible, modify or adapt our plans to take account of community feedback.

Supporting local authorities and strategic partnerships

We work with relevant partners and stakeholders to influence how local services are provided to better meet the needs and aspirations of our customers and the wider community.

We actively support strategic partnerships and housing forums within the areas where we have homes, recognising their role in shaping inclusive, responsive, and sustainable communities.

Our approach to customer engagement is aligned with sector-wide initiatives such as the ‘Together with Tenants’ charter and the ‘Stop the Stigma in Social Housing’ campaign. These initiatives reflect our commitment to strengthening relationships between landlords and customers, promoting transparency, and challenging negative perceptions of social housing.

Supporting customers and communities

We work in partnership with customers to help maintain and improve areas where we own or manage homes.

Responsibilities

The Director of Customer Operations is accountable for all aspects of customer and community engagement.

The Head of Customer Contact and Community Support is responsible for operational delivery of customer and community engagement.

The Customer and Community Involvement Officer is responsible for the delivery of operating procedures relating to customer and community engagement.

The Online Community Manager manages the Magna Voice platform, with oversight from the Leadership and Delivery team and the Digital, Design and Communications team.

We’ll measure the impact of community and stakeholder engagement by: