Our Customers
Reinforcing trust: placing customers at the heart of our business
"Our customers want attractively priced, high quality, sustainable and energy efficient homes, as well as good customer service. Putting customers at the heart of our business, we have, and will continue to, enhance both our service and product offerings in order to meet their expectations.”
Sonia Da Costa
Chief Customer Experience Officer
Trustpilot score has improved by approximately 30% since the start of 2022.
Our Homes
We are proud to offer attractively priced homes for the benefit of our local communities. The Group offers three brands across its UK-wide network of sales outlets, delivering a range of house types in well serviced locations providing customers with high quality, sustainable and energy efficient homes at prices they can afford. Our average private selling price of £272,206 is over 20% below the UK’s national average selling price1, demonstrating the enduring strength of our value offer to customers. We have strengthened our offering to customers both in the house types we provide and the developments we design, through to the improved quality of our homes and an enhanced customer experience.
Our Customer Service
Our aim is to build a compelling brand through placing customers at the heart of our business and being a trusted partner delivering the best value homes customers can be proud of. We understand that buying a home is one of the biggest investments our customers will make.
Our goal is to deliver an excellent experience throughout our customers’ home-buying journey. We aim to achieve this by providing a good blend of both digital and interpersonal service, engaging with our customers through a variety of channels, as well as investing in and empowering our sales and customer care representatives to deliver good customer experiences.
Training
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Through the ‘Persimmon Pathway’, the Group has developed structured professional qualification pathways for its sales teams in partnership with the Institute of Sales Professionals (‘ISP’). This year, the Group has achieved its ISP Investor in Sales award, which is an industry-first programme.
Through the Persimmon Sales Pathway, sales advisors undertake a structured curriculum that integrates Persimmon’s Sales Excellence programme with the ISP’s Continued Professional Development, culminating in an ethics examination prior to accreditation. In addition, the Group has enhanced the in-house customer care training proposition by adding tailored pathways for a variety of roles, as well as registering with the Institute of Customer Service, which will also provide an accredited route to the training of our customer service teams.
Customer relationship management
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Feedback and research tells us that customers today value a blend of digital and interpersonal customer experiences – they want to be able to communicate with our teams quickly and easily, at times and in ways convenient to them.
To enhance our customer engagement and empower our teams to deliver the type of customer experiences our customers expect, we are investing in a new customer relationship management system (YourKeys developed by the Zoopla Group). This system will not only enhance our existing Customer Portal by digitising more of our customer experience, providing customers with more real-time updates and greater transparency, it will also create better employee experiences through a robust and easy to use tool with which to do their job.
This significant enhancement will enable us to continue to develop better relationships with our customers throughout the totality of their home-buying journey.
New Homes Quality Code
The Group became one of the first housebuilders to formally commence the registration process for the New Homes Quality Code (‘NHQC’) on 14 January 2022. We welcome the introduction of the NHQC, which aims to drive up quality and customer service standards across the industry. Persimmon complies with the Consumer Code.
Our customer care
The Persimmon Way aims to build right, first time, every time, improving customer satisfaction and mitigating the need for customer care visits and appointments. However, if problems do occur, we want to rectify them as quickly and efficiently as possible. We have continued to invest in our customer care resource, in digital technology and in training. The Group has strengthened its centralised customer care team, providing specialist skill sets that complement our local teams. This centralised resource also drives a consistent and structured approach across the business for our customers. The Group Training department has developed structured training modules for our customer care teams to drive improvements in the service we provide and enhance customer satisfaction.
Our progress
We are delighted to be a five-star homebuilder for the first time in the Group’s history. The progress that we have made on build quality and customer service is being recognised by our customers. Our eight-week customer satisfaction score2 continues to trend ahead of the five-star threshold. Our nine-month HBF customer satisfaction score has improved by c.10% since the implementation of The Persimmon Way; however, this has fallen slightly when compared year on year (2022: 73.4%, 2021: 75.9%).
The Group’s Trustpilot score has improved by approximately 30% since the start of 2022, reflecting our improved customer service and brand reputation.
FibreNest
FibreNest provides ultrafast full fibre to the home broadband from moving in day. It was developed in response to feedback from customers and aligns with current Government strategy to deliver modern technology to new homes. Our aim is to ensure that FibreNest provides ultrafast speeds coupled with excellent levels of service. FibreNest currently serves over 30,000 customers across over 330 sites, with further roll outs continuing. In 2022, the FibreNest day one connection rate was 90% (2021: 85%). It continues to be a key strength for the business and its customer ratings on Google and Trustpilot are currently ahead of the larger and established internet national market providers.
1. National average selling price for new build homes sourced from the UK House Price Index as calculated by the Office for National Statistics from data provided by HM Land Registry.
2. The Group participates in a National New Homes Survey, run by the HBF. The Survey year covers the period from 1 October to 30 September. The rating system is based on the number of customers who would recommend their builder to a friend .
Our Suppliers
We recognise the importance of maintaining an effective and engaged supply chain in delivering our core focus areas.
Our SuppliersOur Charitable Activities
Persimmon helps to support our communities by making donations to local charities and community groups in the areas where we operate.
Our Charitable Activities