Helen Hutchinson

Helen Hutchinson has been an Accent customer since 1996. Helen has been a member of Accent’s Customer Experience Committee for two years and, as a Customer Champion, she will be reviewing how we deliver our estate services, looking for opportunities for improvement in line with what our customers have told us.

Congratulations on your new role as a Customer Champion, Helen! What was it that brought you closer to being an engaged customer and then on to Accent’s Customer Experience Committee?

I’ve been an Accent tenant for over 27 years now and I got involved a couple of times in the early years I was here, with some feedback groups and answering questions, which I enjoyed but with a young baby and work at the time it was hard. Years later I got involved with feeding back on a tone of voice piece of work for Accent, and I loved it.

That work involved feeding back on some letters that were being sent out to customers where, from a customer point of view, you couldn’t really understand what was being said, or they just scared you when you read them. I could rationalise it and knew that it was a standard letter that was going out and it wasn’t being sent as a personal message, but not everyone reads it like that, so by being involved in that work it meant I could help change that system and change the tone of voice, so that other people like me would then get letters that were understandable and not confusing.

I loved being involved and being able to look at it from a customer point of view. The opportunity to sit on the Customer Experience Committee then came up and it sounded exactly up my street to have that customer overview, and so I’ve been doing that for two years now and I really enjoy it.

In your new role as a Customer Champion for estate services, can you give us an example of what you will be doing?

Yes, I am just starting to get into it, but I have already been involved in an estates case that is sitting with the Housing Ombudsman, so I am going through that. I am going to be travelling to the meet the Accent customer who complained to the Ombudsman to chat it over and am really looking forward to meeting him, customer-to-customer, to see how we can work things out with him.

What will that look like in practice?

Well, I’ve been going through all the information and making notes on it, so I am familiar with everything, but it will be good to hear about it from his side and get his view. It’s good to speak to someone in person rather than just back and forth in texts and letters as it doesn’t always come across in terms of what you are feeling, so we will chat it over, no doubt he will point some things out to me, and hopefully we can see what his expectations would be and we can bring this to a conclusion so that’s he’s happy, and how I can work with Accent to help achieve that.

What drew you to becoming a Customer Champion and what makes you excited for what the role will deliver?

I think it’s about being able to share what we know and take that into a certain field, which in my case is estate services. Being able to let others know what we know and get involved by listening to customers and putting their point of view forward is important, but also for customers to have that understanding that Accent are listening and that we are helping in that process, that makes it worthwhile for me.

In preparation for your role as a new Customer Champion, what tools and resources and access to information have you had so you can interrogate us as an organisation?

The support is there if you need help. I can remember seeing the first reports I had to read on the committee which were huge, and it can be quite intimidating when you think of those people in the meeting, but you are made comfortable at every stage to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question.

Since sitting on the Customer Experience Committee and now as a new Customer Champion, how has your opinion of Accent changed in that time?

I have never had a bad opinion of Accent, but I feel I now have a much better understanding of Accent and what it’s trying to achieve, and how it’s not a profit-making business. You automatically think that Accent it is a business and that somebody is taking all the profits, but it’s not, all the money is reinvested back into building more homes, but not many customers know that.

In your new role what are you most looking forward to scrutinising because you think something may not be right?

For me it’s involving more customers. And being able to share what we know, because I think it’s so important for people to understand about the Customer Champions, about the Customer Experience Committee, about the fact that Accent is a listening organisation, so I’m exciting about getting involved with more customers from that point of view and sharing the knowledge.