Ringwood is the apple of French friends' eye

31 May 2019 

Nicole Sharp will take up the post of Executive Director – Property Services for Sovereign Housing Association, joining the organisation’s Executive Board and bringing a wealth of customer service expertise to the role.

With Sovereign’s most recent strategy emphasising the organisation’s commitment to becoming a modern, connected business, using technology and data hand-in-hand to put residents at the heart of our services, Nicole will bring a new, dynamic focus to the role.

Moving from her current position as Customer Services Director, Nicole will take over on 1 July 2019 from Steve Barford, who announced his decision to leave the organisation earlier this year.

Mark Washer, Sovereign’s Chief Executive, said: “Nicole is an experienced director who’s been instrumental in leading our strategic development and the delivery of housing and landlord services, including managing a business-wide customer contact centre. Passionate about developing a forward-thinking customer-centric culture, Nicole’s played a key role in Sovereign’s digital transformation, creating a strong platform from which we can deliver on our customer commitments. 

“I’m also delighted that we were able to fill such a critical role from our own senior leadership group – highlighting the considerable talent pool within our organisation.”

Nicole said:  “Providing safe, secure, well-maintained homes to our current and future residents is something I feel passionately about. How a person feels about their home strongly influences what that they think about Sovereign as their landlord, so it’s really important that we listen to what our residents say about us, using this to shape and make positive changes to our repairs and maintenance services. By combining this with the use of data and predictive analytics, we’ll really be able to enhance the customer experience. 

“We won’t always get things right first time, but as long as we continue to listen, we’ll create a business that is truly customer-centric; a business that responds positively to our customers’ ever-changing expectations. We want our residents to be proud to call a Sovereign home their own.”  

Nicole’s appointment comes hot on the heels of the announcement that Kevin Ives, formerly of Arriva Trains, Balfour Beatty, Transport for London and Thames Water will join the Sovereign Executive team on 1 August as the organisation’s first Chief Information Officer (CIO).