It may seem counter-intuitive then to look at how you should be empowering your field staff to raise, in some cases, more requests, but that’s exactly what we’ve been doing with some of our clients.

The cold weather, along with recent cost of living issues, has had an unequal impact on the most vulnerable members of our societies, and yet they are often the residents who don’t seek help – either because they can’t, don’t realise help is needed, or ‘don’t want to make a fuss’. When they do raise an issue, there are often problems with inaccurate or missing information that means fixes take longer than they should or may even elevate the severity of the issue.

But how can you take action on such issues if they aren’t being reported? In our experience, the answer lies in empowering your internal teams. Many of your most vulnerable residents will already be known to your housing field workers, who will be in their homes checking on welfare, providing essential support and more. And yet, field workers are often unable to easily raise a maintenance request on behalf of a tenant, often due to limited or no access to repairs & maintenance systems out in the field. Often having to call the contact centre or wait until they are back at a desk to do so.

This often results in increased workload for both field workers and contact centre staff. Not to mention the repairs diagnosed or reported incorrectly.

As part of our Active Housing repairs suite, we’ve enabled staff to directly raise requests on behalf of tenants while they are on site, simply by extending the functionality of our award-winning repairs diagnostics solution, Active Diagnostics.

The Active Housing repairs staff ‘address selector’ module has allowed staff without access to other back-office systems to select a property, diagnose a problem using our Diagnostics product and select an appointment for the customer in real time, with all data seamlessly integrated back into back-office systems (i.e., HMS and / or Scheduler).

The benefits are clear. Field staff can now report issues more swiftly and, as they often know what to look for, can address issues like damp earlier. From a maintenance team perspective, issues can now be reported more clearly and accurately, meaning improvements in First-time Fix rates, and reductions in time spent on jobs; and from a tenant perspective they can enjoy the additional reassurance of the team actively addressing an issue while that team member is in their home. It really is a win-win-win.

If the above touches on any challenges you’re expecting to face over the next few months, or you’d like a broader conversation about how to better support your customers through digital platforms, please do get in touch.