It’s National Scrutiny Week, a week dedicated to celebrating scrutiny in social housing and we want to showcase some of the work you've been involved in! 

Despite the barriers, it's been a great couple of months for customer engagement and it’s great that so many of you have been willing to share your time to provide an important perspective. By involving you at the start of projects, we can ensure our decisions are in your best interest and it also helps us to shape our services in the right direction.   

Here are some of the projects that you’ve co-designed, reviewed and had your say on: 

• Following a review on our customer engagement approach by our scrutiny panel, VIVID Impact, we’ve greatly increased the range of ways you can get involved. By offering more options of informal engagement: surveys, virtual forums, focus groups, we’ve increased our engagement list from a few hundred to over 1,000! 
• You’ve made a difference across the business by assisting in the procurement process for our new kitchen suppliers to ensure customers have more choice, updating our policies and ending fixed term tenancies, to name a few!  
• A series of live events took place over May and June, using new online technology. We were able to share live presentations, hold open and honest question and answers sessions as well as consult customers in polls. These live events enabled us to work with you to make key decisions together for our services during and coming out of lockdown. 
• During the repairs live event session, customers helped to decide our approach to restarting our repairs service as lock down restrictions were lifted and it was agreed that ‘prioritising those repairs that are likely to get worse’, was most customers’ first choice to deal with the waiting list for repairs. Customers also agreed the approach with booking in new repairs appointment, with ‘Tell, then ask’ (‘Tell’ in first few weeks or so, then move towards ask) as their first choice to agree a new repair appointment.  
• VIVID Impact (our scrutiny panel) has also leapt forward with technology, using teams as a channel to continue meetings and share work. This is essential, ensuring that scrutiny can continue to help us improve, even in lockdown!   

Want to get involved? 

If you’d like to get involved, please email us at gettinginvolved@vividhomes.co.uk or call us on 0800 652 0898 and ask for the Customer Engagement team.