Meet the Chair of our new Customer Panel

In September we started recruitment for our Customer Panel members, who will join our newly appointed Chair, Sarah Mason.

We received over 70 applications from customers, and we’re pleased to announce we’ve now recruited 14 panel members, holding our first meeting last Wednesday (23 November).

We spoke to Sarah Mason our Chair of our new Customer Panel to find out more about the panel and what she is looking forward to most in her role.

Tell us a bit about your career?
​​​​​​​I’m a Diversity and Inclusion Manager for a finance company and I’m also the voluntary Vice-Chair of Swindon and Wiltshire Pride. I’ve led service industry roles for many years, particularly helping teams to review root causes to find better and more innovative ways to help the customer.

Why did you want to become Chair of the Customer Panel?
I'm passionate about how customers feel about the services they receive, especially when they don't necessarily have the ability to take their custom elsewhere! Getting the best value for money and really listening to what customers need is something I believed I could bring to the role.

Tell us more about the Customer Panel?
The Customer Panel will work in partnership with us to ensure resident-led scrutiny where the customer's voice is heard and used to influence and drive performance and service improvements. The panel will also provide assurance that we are conducting ourselves in an open, transparent and accountable way.

They will be involved in co-developing and contributing to the development and delivery of an annual programme of works and involvement. They’ll also provide a customers’ perspective to colleagues and respond to ideas, proposals and documents presented to them.

What is your role as Chair of our Customer Panel?
I believe first and foremost it is to listen to what customers are telling us. I need to be able to feed this back to GreenSquareAccord and be a conduit for getting things done. I believe the one thing that customers want to know is that they are being listened to and that GreenSquareAccord will work to make the lives of their customers better.

I think my role is also to be a pragmatist as not everything that customers want may always be deliverable.

How have you found your first few weeks as Chair?
Pretty busy to be honest. I’ve interviewed people who would like to become part of our Customer Panel, which has kept me busy and has been a great start to my new role. I’m so excited that we now have our panel in place and am looking forward to working with them all.

I have found the support from GreenSquareAccord to be fantastic, and the offers of support and help I have received from senior members has encouraged me to believe that everybody wants to make this new panel a success.

What are you most looking forward to doing in your new role?
I’m most looking forward to meeting with GreenSquareAccord customers and hearing their views and feedback.

What challenges do you think you might come across?
As a group, we will need to see the big picture, and this may be difficult as many areas will have differing challenges.

How do you hope you’ll be able to make a difference?
I’m hoping that by bringing GreenSquareAccord and customers together, we’ll make a difference and start getting results.

What do you think success looks like for our Customer Panel?
I think that success for the Customer Panel will be customers and GreenSquareAccord working well together resulting in some amazing outcomes for both parties.

We need to make sure we’re setting the right goals at the start of our group and also being able to measure our success.