Friday 9 January 2015

those who find it hardest to pay for home contents insurance can least afford to go without it

Wolverhampton Homes offer incredibly cheap home contents insurance to its customers.

Quite honestly, it is half what l pay personally.  If l was offered a similar deal myself I'd have someone's arm off to get it!

understandably, for people with restricted incomes you need to think very carefully about what you spend.  On occasions people on a budget say they can't afford insurance - or they'll get around to it if their circumstances improve.

In reality, it is those who can least afford to buy home contents insurance who need it the most.

Perversley, if someone is in a position that they have so much money they don't even have to think about what home contents insurance costs them they need it the least.

The question is:  if you lost everything could you afford to replace the essentials?  If the answer isn 'no', then you really need home contents cover -whatever the cost!

as an important footnote please don't get a false sense of security that tenants in the UK are automatically covered by their landlord for leaks.

Who ever the landlord is, what a lot of people don't realise is that for example just because a pipe leaks and a tenant's property is damaged, it does not mean the landlord is legally liable.  The law says pipes leak.  Landlords cannot be expected to routinely check pipes and be responsible if they fail.  Courts recognise that this kind of incident is predictable and the market offers insurance to tenants so they can protect themselves from the consequences.  As harsh as it may seem, as far as the courts are concerned if someone chooses not to insure, and suffers a loss as a result they only have themselves to blame.

Again, l come back to my main point, those who can least afford to pay for home contents insurance are the ones who can't afford to go without it (because they are the ones who can least afford to replace their contents themselves).

Wednesday 7 January 2015

How happy are Wolverhampton Homes Tenants?

We're still working through the data on our recent customer satisfaction survey on Wolverhampton Homes services to tenants (leaseholders have thier own survey).  It is too early to say anything on this, but there was one very interesting result on the issue of happiness in general.

As part of our recent customer satisfaction survey, tenants who were surveyed were asked to rate their satisfaction with their life nowadays on a scale of 0 to 10.

The scale was based on a 0 if people felt 'not at all satisfied ' to 10 for 'completely satisfied'.

Interestingly the most common single response was 10 out of 10 given by 26% of tenants!

If those who gave a rating of 7 or more out of 10 are considered to be satisfied, 64% of Wolverhampton Home tenants fall within this category.

Defining dissatisfied as those giving a rating of 0-3, 8% of tenants are dissatisfied with their life nowadays.

The reason why we asked this question was to put a bit of mood music in the background to the survey.  Generally if people are feeling upbeat they're more likely to ignore faults with a service overall.  Similarly if they're feeling downbeat there more likely to find fault.

My idea was that if we had a satisfaction with life score everytime we did a survey it would give us some context.

If customer satisfaction went up, but people were generally feeling more satisfied with life anyway, it probably indicated that the improved satisfaction wasn't all down to us.  On the otherhand if satisfaction went up against a background of generally increased dissatisfaction - then chances are we had really improved the service.

As this was the first time we'd asked the question we had no benchmark to compare to from the 2012 satisfaction survey.  We asked a supplimentary question this time about how happy people felt now compared to 2012.

Compared to two years ago, almost two thirds (63%) of tenants think they would have given the same rating to their satisfaction with life. Among the remainder, equal proportions say their rating would have been higher (19%) or lower (18%). On this basis, although a simplistic measure, these results suggest that there has been no obvious shift in contentment within the Wolverhampton Homes customer base in either direction that could account for changes in perceptions since 2012.
The result surprised me.  As an accountant l believe to a great extent money makes people happy(er). I would have thought that 5 years of austerity would mean people were less happy now than in the recent past. On reflection though, I'm not sure if l could answer the question of how happy am l now compared to 2 years ago terribly well myself.  I might remember what l was doing two years, but I'm not sure l could say accurately how happy l was.  If other people are like me it could explain why most people said they felt the same level of happiness now as in 2012. I look forward to seeing if the 6.4 happiness score has gone up or down next time we ask the question!