The importance of engagement

Engagement ensures customers live the lives they choose

In Advance’s 50th birthday year, Jaqueline Russon, Customer Engagement Manager, considers the importance of engagement in improving services for customers.

Jackie Russon

Engagement isn’t a choice – it's critical.  We need to understand what challenges our customers are facing to be able to provide the right services. We want to know their aspirations to play our part in supporting them to achieve them.  

Because our customers have a wide range of needs, it’s vital we provide different ways for individuals to feed back and get involved depending on what suits them.

Our Customer Engagement Plan sets all this out, with opportunities for feedback, to influence the way we design and deliver services, and for us to help customers pursue interests and fulfil goals.

A range of options

A range of formal channels – including the annual customer satisfaction survey and the quarterly Housing Partnership meetings where customers scrutinise our performance, sit alongside more informal opportunities like house meetings, customer visits, and social events.

Since the isolation of the COVID pandemic, creating opportunities for customers to connect with each other has become an even more important strand of our approach. One of the ways we do this is through the Customer Collective, which meets regularly to learn, share information, socialise and support each other.

We’ve increased its frequency and placed focus on increasing the numbers. A timetable of events now runs alongside monthly meetings, featuring guest speakers, and activities from quizzes to armchair exercise.

The group is not only of huge value to customers but also to colleagues across the business, with members getting involved in co-production initiatives to improve services, most recently the development of an induction session for new starters and safeguarding awareness training for customers. Regional representatives from the group will join me to deliver the training across the country, completing the circle of their involvement and allowing them to see the impact of their input.

Face-to-face focus

We place huge value on face-to-face engagement. Teams and zoom calls are one thing, but sitting with and listening to customers can’t be beaten.

It’s a challenge, with customers spread across the country and, like every housing and support provider, limited time and resources. But by being smart and strategic, working closely with support managers and outreach teams, we can make sure every interaction is an opportunity to gather feedback and follow up, showing customers how their contribution is of value.

It’s also important for customers to see that senior staff value their views, so we’ve developed Have Your Say days; regular visits by myself and Julie, our Chief Executive, where we catch up with customers, along with their friends and families. Interestingly, what customers want from us and what their families want for them can differ, and these catch-ups are a valuable opportunity to delve into how we can support our customers and those that care about them in the best way.

Making feedback fun

Our 50th birthday has not only given us a fantastic opportunity to reflect on how far services for people with learning disabilities and mental health issues have come – and they have come a long, long way looking back at how things were done 50 years ago - but also to have some fun with our customers.

We know that when they are relaxed and doing something they want to be doing, our customers engage more. After all, how many of us would choose to sit in a two-hour meeting to share our thoughts rather than doing it while having a bit of fun, taking part in an activity, a party or a walk?

This year, in addition to our usual offerings, customers have chosen the theme for the birthday celebrations – Hawaiian and colourful – and we’ve been hosting parties at schemes across the country, with hundreds of customers getting involved; a lot of fun, alongside opportunity for enhanced engagement, relationship-building and feedback, which will feed into our planning for the years ahead.

Engage to improve

To ensure our customers can ‘live the lives they choose’, our vision for everyone we support, we need to engage on their terms. That’s particularly crucial for us considering the varied and complex needs of those we support but is equally important across the sector in general. Engagement is about enhancing people’s lives, people who don't always find it easy to share their views or haven't always been able to have a say in their own lives.

While engagement is now more of a focus in meeting the Regulator’s requirements and scoring well in the TSM’s, for Advance it isn’t the only driver.

With or without the new regulations, we’d be engaging with our customers in every way we can, because we need and want to. Transforming lives is the reason we are here, and we can only achieve that through real and meaningful engagement.