Housing Officer

at  The Riverside Group

ROLE PROFILE

To maximise the economic viability, social sustainability and self sufficiency of the tenancies through targeted support, services and action, establishing and maintaining strong relationships with customers, acting as an ‘Account Manager’, advocating for the customer to ensure that other teams are providing services to the expected level. Delivered through flexible, self-led and resourceful processes that enables the front line worker to put customer first.

ROLE REQUIRES YOU TO:

• Pro-actively manage, maintain and improve designated social housing neighbourhoods; dealing with all aspects of tenancy conditions, including service failures, creating, promoting and adopting a culture of customer care in accordance with agreed processes, standards, timescales and targets.
• Accountable for maximising and increasing income collection, working in partnership with Shared Service colleagues to ensure good payment practices are established from tenancy start, support customers with benefit claims, signposting for advice and carrying out home visits during arrears pursuance process.
• Represent the Group in Court for all cases brought against customers in your designated area, ensuring cases are progressed effectively and efficiently and relevant stakeholders are kept up to date with developments and outcomes.
• As an “Account Manager” for the customer and property, be responsible for identifying issues which can be resolved with early intervention, be responsible for liaising with internal & external stakeholders to ensure services and actions are effective and efficient to build lasting, satisfactory and sustainable tenancies.
• Accountable for ‘patch profitability’, minimising void rent loss, identify cash leakage, working in partnership with Shared Service colleagues to carry out inspections, property viewings and managing tenancy sign ups and new tenancy visits.
• Manage a delegated discretionary budget, making decisions regarding the allocation of your budget, ensuring Group financial controls are adhered to robustly and effectively.
• Provide quality assurance for all communal areas in your patch, escalating contracted service failures to the relevant contract owner for resolution, and resolving other issues using the relevant procedure.
• Commission, direct and influence other teams as appropriate to resolve low level anti-social behaviour issues, hate crimes, domestic abuse and issues impacting community cohesion, escalating complex cases to the Community Safety Team as appropriate.
• Maximise the use of mobile technology to ensure the provision of an efficient and proactive customer service to customers.
• Champion and promote usage of the online self-service facility, to contribute to ongoing financial efficiencies across the Group by reducing the demand on front line resources.
• Work collaboratively with a range of stakeholders to deliver customer involvement objectives and stakeholder management within a specified area, attending community meetings where relevant to the Group and its customers.
• Build effective and strong relationships with customers, identify customer’s needs and aspirations, provide targeted support and use of customer intelligence to drive tenancy sustainability.
• Provide clear, supportive and accurate social housing advice to customers, colleagues and other stakeholders, including signposting where appropriate, to ensure awareness of the service and the effective progression and resolution of cases.
• Act as an advocate for customers, both internally and externally where appropriate to ensure their expectations are maintained and they are receiving the appropriate levels of service.
• Work with customers to minimise and resolve issues and complaints, liaising with the Customer Complaints Team to resolve escalated complaints as required. .
• Promote opportunities for customers to engage with and be involved in key decision making through our customer involvement function, to ensure the delivery of a service that meets their needs.
• Work with regional colleagues, providing local intelligence on neighbourhood level issues to contribute to the regional planning process.
• Ensure internal business processes are followed in line with the Group’s policy, procedures and statutory requirements.
• Maintain accurate records using appropriate systems, ensuring the integrity and quality of Social Housing service data, to enable regular analysis to be carried out and reporting to be completed as required. · Contribute to the continuous improvement of processes and procedures.
• Accountable for organising your own work, priorities and objectives to meet the organisational goals, with the focus being “self-led” with customers need and requirements at the forefront to improve the areas for which you are responsible for.
• Respond flexibly to any necessary changes in work priorities and undertake other duties when required to support the effective operation of the service.
• Build relationships with local stakeholders in order to foster partnership working to deliver shared neighbourhood improvement.
• Ensure that all data protection requirements are met in accordance with the Group’s policy, procedures and statutory requirements.
• Ensure that health and safety requirements are met in accordance with the Group’s policy, procedures and statutory requirements