Large can be local

L&Q currently manages over 56,000 homes across London & the South East, housing 1 family every 15 minutes each working day. With such a large number of properties and plans to continue to grow L&Q remains committed to offering high quality services to residents. L&Q has several offices across London to deliver services locally and in addition to this has a customer service centre (launched in 2005) which became L&Q Direct in March 2008.

What L&Q Direct does:

• Offers a single phone number for L&Q to residents, including leaseholders
• Offers first time support on all enquiries about repairs, rent, service charges, tenancies, anti-social behaviour, complaints and leasehold issues
• Deals with all resident post, emails and requests via the web.
• In most cases the member of staff taking the call will be able to deal with the enquiry. If they can’t, they will do all they can and then pass on the query to someone who can help further. Currently over 90% of calls are dealt with at the first point of contact.

Tim Mulvenna, L&Q Director of Customer Services outlines the reasons behind the introduction of L&Q Direct: “The main reason for launching L&Q Direct was to improve service to our residents. They were telling us that it was sometimes quite complicated to get through to the right person and that they would prefer one main way to get in contact with L&Q for general enquiries. However, we are committed to L&Q Direct being seen as an additional service as opposed to a replacement as we have not closed our local offices. These will remain open to handle ongoing cases that can not be resolved at L&Q Direct.”

The Housing Services Team at L&Q Direct is a new addition to the team and deals with general enquiries which previously made up 70% of the calls received by L&Q’s local offices. Since introducing these changes in March 2008 the local offices have already seen a 30% reduction in these types of calls.

Tim Mulvenna explains the positive effect this has had; ”By freeing up the time of local staff they are able to spend more time on the frontline, becoming more estate based, they can now use this time to work more on the difficult cases of ASB and being more visible to our residents. We now have more resources locally than ever before showing that large can be local. As the efficiency of L&Q’s customer services increases, money saved by L&Q Direct is immediately invested back into the frontline to be able to provide even higher quality services for residents, increasing our ability to identify and respond to their needs.”

“Going forward we plan to continue this focus on customer services as resident satisfaction is key to what we do. To do this we need to continue to increase efficiency. We need to continue with the ability to respond and direct resources as needed locally, we do not want to ever lose sight of the residents as the quality of service we offer them drives what we do.”

This article is taken from the October issue of Creating Places Magazine

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