Osborne Celebrates National Customer Service Week

Osborne Property Services has embraced National Customer Service Week with a host of activities at its offices, reflecting the importance the company places on delivering an excellent customer experience.

National Customer Service Week (5-9 October) is organised by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), with a different theme for each day, such as ‘recognition and celebration’ and ‘return on investment’.

For ‘know your customer’ day, Osborne’s head office in Reigate focused on its internal customer service and arranged for five frontline operatives to visit back office staff.

On ‘customer complaints MOT’ day, staff completed quizzes and short questionnaires on simple steps they felt could reduce complaints. Suggestions from one office on the repairs service included ‘always keep the tenant fully informed’ and ‘make courtesy calls when an appointment may be missed’.

Meanwhile, Winchester played host to the first of a series of Osborne staff roadshow events and which happened to fall on ‘employee engagement and culture’ day.

This allowed the team to explore this to the full with staff engaging in sessions and answering questions such as ‘when making a call or liaising with us, what do you think is important to our customers?’. Pre-recorded videos with customers answering the same questions were then played.

Graca Machado, OPSL Customer Experience Director, said: ‘This week is an opportunity for us to reinforce the great work our teams do day in, day out with all our customers.

‘Although we are proud of our achievements working with housing providers, this is just the beginning. We recognise the pressure social landlords are under to deliver more for less. We will continue to support our clients to improve our services – that way everyone benefits.’

In recent years, Osborne has established a strong track record on customer service.

Earlier in 2015 it was the first housing contractor to be awarded the prestigious ICS ServiceMark, and just last month, OPSL’s expertise was recognised after it helped create a government-backed customer service apprenticeship.

Over the last three years Osborne, has increased its UK Customer Satisfaction Index score from 55 (out of 100) to 80. The achievement, independently assessed by ICS, comes at a time when the satisfaction levels of UK consumers more widely have fallen.