Our starting point was to talk to customers about what they need and value from us and listen to what they had to say. In fact, the working title for our Customer Commitments was our Customer Value Proposition.

We carried out lots of research, including a telephone survey which involved more than 230 hours of conversations with customers, along with customer focus groups and colleague workshops.

One of the most significant findings was that the home is the most important factor in our customers’ relationship with us, and our role in our customers’ lives is to provide a safe, affordable home that our customers love and are proud to live in.

You’ll see this reflected in our Customer Commitments which start with the home; and, of course, for each of the four individual commitments, the customer and how they are feeling comes first.

There are many reasons why our Customer Commitments are important.

Sometimes, what we do and the services we provide can be quite complex. Our Customer Commitments help us to bring clarity to our service offer, so there’s no uncertainty around what we aim to deliver and the standards we strive for.

Similarly, they help us to re-set expectations with our customers, while also ensuring that as colleagues, we’re clear on what’s expected of us. Our customers have told us that we can be inconsistent. Our Customer Commitments help us to overcome this by giving us one set of standards that we aim to deliver.

Above all, if we meet these standards for every customer and in every interaction, we’ll deliver our vision and give our customers an excellent experience. We’ll build more open, transparent and trusting relationships with our customers, and in turn, our customers will feel more positive about us being their landlord.

In short, yes! While it might be more obvious how colleagues in customer-facing roles can deliver our Customer Commitments, everyone at Orbit has a part to play. As we strive towards achieving these standards, it’s important that we all think ‘customer-first’ and consider what our customers value at every opportunity.

Our Customer Commitments work in tandem with our values, Colleague Commitments and Employer Promise, so whatever role you have at Orbit, you’ll be able to understand the beliefs, behaviours, actions and attitudes that will help you to deliver our Customer Commitments.

Our Customer Commitments should act as a reference point for everything we do – every strategy that’s written, every conversation with a customer, every decision about how we spend our budgets, every letter that’s sent. The standards we set in our Customer Commitments should be embedded into everything we do and say as an organisation.

In the first instance, the focus is on launching the Customer Commitments to colleagues. A little further down the line, when we’ve had chance to make these commitments part of our everyday working lives, we’ll share them with customers and we’ll also look at how they can be used to strengthen the services our partners and contractors deliver on our behalf.

The Customer Promise has now been retired. While the Customer Promise was relevant to our Orbit 25 strategy, we wanted to create a new set of commitments that matched the ambition of the new 2030 strategy. It was important that these commitments were based on up-to-date insight and firmly grounded in what our customers tell us they value from our services.