Customer Service Charter

Standards of Response for telephone, web, mail and fax enquiries

You can expect us to: -

• Answer 90% of all telephone calls within three rings during our office hours of 9.00am to 5.00pm Monday to Friday.
• Reply to any voicemail messages within four working hours.
• Answer e-mail messages within five working days of receipt.
• Respond to faxes within five working days of receipt.
• Answer web-based enquiries within five working days of receipt.
• Reply to letters within five working days of receipt.

A summary of our management responsibilities

We will fully discharge our contractual obligations to you and manage your development in accordance with good practice.  In particular you can expect us to: -

• Provide you with a comprehensive service charge budget within two weeks of the period start date.
• Arrange for the service charge accounts to be externally audited and provided to you within 6 months of the year-end.
• Manage your service charge monies in accordance with the ARMA, ARHM and RICS codes of practice and at all times have appropriate fiduciary and Professional Indemnity insurance cover.
• Deal with communal repairs and maintenance issues using only approved and insured contractors.
• Make regular and documented visits to your development.
• Engage with and build long-term positive relationships with all of our customers.

We will endeavour to: -

• Deliver our services in a friendly and inclusive manner.
• Treat you with courtesy and professionalism.
• Give you clear, accurate and helpful information.
• Deal with your requests, enquiries and concerns promptly.
• Treat all customers equally and without discrimination.
• Maintain confidentiality at all times.
• Find new and better ways of delivering our service

To assist us in delivering this high standard of service, we would ask you to kindly treat our staff with courtesy and in a manner in which you would expect to be treated.

What you can expect from us when making a complaint

If you have been pleased with the service we have provided to you, we would very much welcome your kind comments, it does wonders for our morale!  Please address any such comments to your Property Manager, or one of our Regional Operations Directors.  All such compliments are published in our quarterly staff newsletter.

Mainstay strives to offer the highest quality of service to all its clients. However, we recognise that issues do sometimes arise and in accordance with good practice we have set out in this document the steps that you should take in the event that you are dissatisfied with any aspect of our service.

In the first instance if you have a complaint against Mainstay or a member of its staff, then you should raise this with the relevant property manager for your site (details can be found on our website under ‘Your Property’) who will endeavour to resolve it as promptly as possible, if necessary by arranging a face to face meeting.

In the event that you feel it necessary to take the matter further then you may do so by contacting the Regional Operations Director in writing at the following address:-

You should set out the nature and details of your concerns and copy in any relevant details and correspondence. The Regional Operations Director will endeavour to respond to written complaints within 3 working days of receipt and aim to fully resolve issues to the satisfaction of both parties within 8 weeks.

If you remain unsatisfied with the response then you may write directly to the Managing Director at Mainstay enclosing full details as above. The Managing Director and/or a Member of the Executive Board will review the matter and all correspondence and respond to you within 5 working days.

At this point if you feel the issue has still not been resolved or you have received a letter from us saying that we are no longer considering your complaint or that we cannot do anything further for you (sometimes referred to as a ‘deadlock letter’) then you may refer your complaint to the Surveyors Ombudsman Service (SOS). This is the redress mechanism approved by the regulatory board of The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) of which we are a member firm.

The SOS provide a free and independent service and have been approved by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to run a redress scheme and can handle complaints about RICS members. Their role is to investigate complaints fairly by listening to both sides of the story and looking at the facts.

Their contact details are below:-

• Telephone: 0330 440 1634 or 01925 530270
• E-mail: enquiries@surveyors-ombudsman.org.uk
• Website: www.surveyors-ombudsman.org.uk

Ways to contact us

We like to hear from our customers.  Please tell us if you are happy with our service, our colleagues in Mainstay find this particularly rewarding.  Similarly, if you are unhappy with our service please let us know so we can improve it.