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I t’s become a familiar story to social housing tenants; staff and skills shortages matched with lockdown’s heavily increased use of heating, plumbing, and electrical systems means your appointment request has joined the housing association maintenance backlog. The scale of the problem facing schedule and dispatch teams is now critical, with one UK city council claiming their backlog has swelled from a running average of 24,000 to around 40,000 repairs tickets between the lockdowns.

Social Landlords and Housing Associations are legally bound to ensure properties are ‘free from hazards, warm enough, and in a reasonable state of repair’. But tenants with urgent maintenance requirements find the backlog presents an impossible choice. Do they attempt to fix faults themselves (and risk their safety and breaking their contract) or wait, potentially weeks, for a ‘make do and mend’ before accepting their final appointment is months away?

Workforce management software can end the housing association maintenance backlog by taking control of both sides of the appointment equation – the request and the dispatch. Here, we introduce three features of the software that create capacity, minimise travel, and improve first-time fix productivity.

HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS CAN BETTER MANAGE MAINTENANCE REQUESTS

The first step in gaining control of maintenance requests is for Social Landlords to organise the three appointment types,

• Emergency call-out
• General upkeep/improvement
• Inspection for preventative works

Workforce management software requires these tickets to be digitised. Asking for contact details and a location are simply not enough. Data across appointment type, damage, impact; even the vulnerability of the household, will fulfil the second part of the process – scheduling the workforce efficiently, in real-time.

This may be achieved in two ways. The most popular is a customer self-service portal feeding tickets directly into a CRM. Question fields may be continually refined to ensure both the service user and the works team have all the details they need, cutting away unnecessary followup calls. An escalation process then reviews the tickets to establish correct prioritisation and quality. The second is for call operators to digitise the tickets into the CRM, or to use an in-house version of the portal. Either way, a picture of the works request is built to determine the requirement for workforce skills, materials, and time.

Modern customer portals can go beyond raising a ticket. Empowering tenants to schedule and reschedule via guided appointment windows 24/7 increases satisfaction and lowers costs at head office – for reinvestment into the field. They also create quantitative, actionable data to planning and management teams. Trends analysis provides insights around failing parts and assets, and knowing when and where to scale-up field resources.

See what other features FLS PORTAL can offer Housing Associations ›