Customer Excellence in Action: Southway Housing's Success with CSE

Customer Service Excellence Certification Journey:

Southway Housing was recently awarded the Customer Service Excellence Accreditation. The Trust was first accredited with the CSE Standard in 2012 and retained this standard for approximately ten years.  Following COVID, a decision was made to discontinue the process, largely due to competing priorities. 

In 2024, with a new five-year plan in place, a refreshed People Strategy and a new leadership team, we felt ready to reapply for accreditation. We believed the Standard still aligned strongly with our strategic direction and would support our commitment to service improvement. To ensure the process was as thorough as possible, we requested a new assessor who had not previously worked with the Trust.

 As was the case previously, we found the standard to be a really effective way of ‘self-auditing’ our approach to using customer data and insight in a meaningful way. Everyone involved found the certification process to be a genuinely enjoyable, as it didn’t feel like a traditional audit, more like a series of insightful conversations with someone who was genuinely interested in how we operate. Thus, we were delighted to receive an excellent grading which was a real boost to everyone involved.   

Although we found all aspects of the audit to be useful in different ways, we felt that the Customer Insight and Culture sections were particularly relevant to our organisation, being in the Social Housing sector.

Engaging with customers in a meaningful way is central to our purpose and key to our success, and this is the reason we decided to apply for the CSE standard. Moreover, the ‘Customer Voice’ underpins everything that we do, and those sections focus a lot on how this information is used to influence services and policies. Nevertheless, we found all aspects of the criteria helped us to audit our operating model, making it easier to identify where there were gaps or areas that needed to be improved. 

Luke Benfield, Head of Customer Access & Service Improvement at Southway Housing said:

“We would definitely recommend the CSE standard to other organisations like us – it is an excellent tool for anyone looking to either formalise or improve their approach to using customer insight to improve service delivery. 

We have worked with the CFA for over 10 years now and had various assessors involved with our applications and audits. We’ve always found the certification process positive and enjoyable process and we have been very happy with the service provided by CfA.

For More Information: 

If you'd like more information on the CSE standard, visit our website.