I have the good fortune to work with some of the most forward thinking organisations in the area – Cardiff Community Housing Association (CCHA) being one of them. Last year they won the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Customer Service award for their work in fostering a customer focused culture through an innovative culture change project. I continue to work with them on this project.
In addition to this, they are one of the few housing associations to put on an event to increase engagement and collaboration with their suppliers. CCHA know that from a customer’s point of view all their suppliers, including building and small maintenance contractors, are ‘the face of CCHA’ and thus need to carry through their ethos and standards of customer service.
CCHA do this through their ‘Annual Collaboration Conference’ which was held this year at Cotterell Park Golf Club. The conference included a range of external speakers sharing the latest on health and safety, sustainability, diversity, the corporate health standard, how to manage personal safety and more. CCHA also presented their customer satisfaction results and their latest Health and Safety strategy. One key section was ‘How could we work together better?’ Here suppliers were given the opportunity to write and submit their ideas for improvements to joint working anonymously.
The feedback from delegates was very positive and many new relationships were formed on the day. Â All this will help CCHA in their mission to ‘Be the best!’ – their customer culture strap line.
My role in this was to work with the CCHA team and project manage the whole event including: finding suitable venue, devising the agenda, booking speakers, marketing to potential delegates, creating a purposeful promotional gift and everything else that goes into making a successful conference.
It was good to use my wider skill set and I learned more about the scope of their work as a Housing Association.