After the above conversation, the company decided to trial the new system. Cottsway Housing is the largest social landlord in West Oxfordshire and aims to grow by 10% over the next year. With a diverse clientele spread across a large area, there was no central place for handling complaints, making it difficult to collate and analyse results. Impressed by the success with ReACT, John knew that even greater rewards were available by using ReSOLVE. 

“Because staff already used ReACT, they quickly adapted to ReSOLVE with very little training. It is an easy system to get information onto and out of, and we have already saved time by using both programs side-by-side. ReSOLVE, on its own, has already shown results after 9 months of use. For instance, we have started a Complaints and Satisfaction Learning Group with tenants, to identify how we can improve our service. ReSOLVE provides the data that helps us with trend analysis and feeds into group discussions.

Another benefit has been the impact on our other systems. With a central database we were able to highlight a lot of complaints from our rural areas and make adjustments to the way our systems worked.

Whilst Cottsway prefers to keep ReSOLVE as a central recording facility, John is very aware of its potential to expand.

“One of the great things about ReSOLVE is that you can make it as complex or simple as you wish. Case management, KPI’s, document storage – it’s your choice. And the support is magnificent, with someone always available when you need them. I spent three days implementing the system, with Chris and Steve always available on the end of the phone. They talked me through the process, making sure that ReSOLVE would do what I wanted it to do. The result is a system I know inside-out, despite very little technology training. “

However, the real litmus test of any system is how it matches up to outside scrutiny, as another one of John’s meetings reveals.

“I recently gave some presentations at HouseMark club meetings, about our new complaints system. I did not know beforehand that I would be following the Housing Ombudsman on the same topic! Fortunately, ReSOLVE met all the criteria set out by the spokesman during his talk and I delivered my own presentation without having to change a word.”