Our Customers
We believe that moving into a new community and a new home should be an enjoyable and exciting experience. We aim to make our customers’ journey from reservation to post-completion as enjoyable and stress free as possible.
In addition to this we aim to deliver a consistent approach to product delivery. Regardless of whether a customer has purchased directly from us or via a multi-tenure partnership model, everyone can expect the same quality from our homes.
We continually strive to improve our customers’ experience. This comes in many forms from providing training to our teams to help them excel at what they do, investing in solutions across the business to ensure we work and engage with our customers as efficiently and diligently as possible, through to thorough reviews and inspections of the properties we build.
This is an ever-evolving programme of work and something which has seen unprecedented change due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The need to maintain engagement with our customers in a remote setting has resulted in accelerated adoption to additional digital solutions. We acknowledge this change and continue to work to deliver a progressive, digitised customer experience to enhance the face-to-face engagement which still remains firmly at the heart of our customers’ journey.
Customer satisfaction
We were pleased to again be awarded a five-star customer satisfaction rating from the Home Builders Federation’s New Home Satisfaction Survey in March 2023. This rating demonstrates that nine out of ten of our customers would recommend us to a friend, an accolade we hold in the highest regard.
In March 2022, we were also awarded both the Gold Award and the Outstanding Achievement Award for customer satisfaction by InHouse, an independent research firm. The Outstanding Achievement Award is only given to companies with a yearly Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 65% or over.
We endeavour to provide the best possible customer experience from the moment we engage with a potential customer right through to them living in their new Countryside home.
"Countryside have been amazing and really supportive through it all. They have made it achievable for us to buy our dream home."
James and Olivia – customers at Wilson Chase, Merseyside
Click below to find out more about James and Olivia's experience of buying with Countryside.
Learning from our customers
Without our customers’ feedback, we wouldn’t be able to truly create places that people love. No one know their homes and local communities better than our customers. We utilise the feedback from the Home Builders Federation as well as and a third-party independent research body to help us think about the way we design our homes and community, as well as help to continually improve our customer service.
We also undertake longer-term research looking at how well our homes and communities perform once customers have moved in. This type of study is called Building Performance Evaluation, and it allows us to understand how well the places we build operate in reality compared to how we designed them. This research is supported by in-depth surveys with the homes’ occupiers to give us a complete picture of what works well, what our customers love about their home and community, and where we can make improvements in the future decision making on the types of home to build and improvements and the way we engage with and support customers.
Supporting our customers
We offer a suite of schemes to support our customers getting on and moving through the property ladder, from Assisted Move and Part Exchange supporting existing homeowners with stress-free sales of their current homes through to Bank of Mum and Dad, financial incentives providing much needed support to first-time buyers. We are pleased to have been a part of the Government’s Help to Buy: Equity Loan scheme; since the inception of the original scheme in 2013 we have been able to help hundreds of first-time buyers to get on the property ladder.
At Countryside, we also deliver affordable homes to local authorities and partners across England. We appreciate that the need for a safe, secure place to call home should be accessible to everyone regardless of their affordability. In FY22 we built 1,612 affordable homes as a part of our commitment to address the housing shortage.
We have a dedicated, professional team to support our customers through every step of the buying process through to moving into their new homes and beyond. Our Sales and Customer Service teams are trained to place the customer at the heart of everything they do, an approach which is embedded through clearly defined processes aimed at ensuring the highest level of service across our business.