Repair Failures

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy
or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

While I am known as the ‘Housing I.T. Guy’, it might be surprising to many who know me, but haven’t worked together with me, to learn a lot of my job involves tackling organisational problems and often service failures. To social housing tenants, often they only encounter ‘customer service’ too late after the initial event, after a failed element of service, that has been badly delivered.

Clearly when that happens, its harrowing and stressful for the resident, as well as being very expensive for the RSL. A £150 repair, done badly, requiring multiple visits to get right, creating a complaint that will take days of extra effort to close out, will cost maybe 20 times that. Its expensive to get things wrong and terrible from a reputational viewpoint, as Social Housing landlords, such as Clarion & Sanctuary, have found to their peril, when the ITV documentary team ruck up, to examine years long damp & mould issues. These sometimes show a lack of respect and consideration for tenants, which is not warranted. Tenant anger also occasionally spills over too about this.

I know the ICT solutions I help organisations access, provide modern systems and support processes to improve all of this. They cannot do it on their own, organisation culture plays a part too. A lot of my work is more about that latter area, because without that, the ICT does not work to its best. I like to procure the best for everyone I work with, it hacks me off, when the system has got six gears and the organisation insists on just using the first three, and in manual ‘stick-shift’ mode too!

If you follow me on Twitter at @HousingITguy, you may often see me interacting a lot with tenants and leaseholders, as well as CEOS, computer nerds and other housing gurus. In a typical month, I must help five or so folk with progressing their problems. We win some, we lose some, but they all feed into my professional life, helping councils, HA’s and smaller housing/care charities with better ICT for social housing. DM’s (Direct Messages) are mostly how a lot of this is done, although a retweet from me with 17k followers can often have a laxative style effect, on focusing the thinking of a comms team about jumping on a resident issue, that’s been festering for sometime 😉.

So, based on a few problems I have helped with lately, what takeaways could I share with organisations looking to improve their repairs operation? Copy & paste or notebooks at the ready, here we go, social housing ICT Blogcats.

The number one issue that seems to still dog housing providers, is starting with a decent diagnosis of the resident issue. No excuse for this in terms of available repair diagnostic tools to assist, for self-serve and the telephone agent experience. Not asking the right 5 or 6 questions in the first instance, sets everyone up to fail. IE The repairs team, contractor being used and the end customer, our resident. That last person is the most important one too. 

They (your resident), are likely these days to be juggling one or more part-time jobs to make ends meet in the current challenging climate, a bit of extended family child-care or maybe medical issues (just like many of us not in social housing). Chasing them to ask more clarification questions later, wastes even more time for all. In this day & age, is it too challenging to accept an image of the issue too? Some self-service embarrassingly seems to even struggle with this.

Once a repair is logged, its amazing how few organisations confirm via a works order or issue number. Its so easy these days to communicate this via SMS txt, together with the priority (24 hours, 5 or 20 days, or whatever), why not ensure the resident knows what priority it fairly deserves? Many residents I help seem to repeat that they ‘reported the issue multiple times, in person, by post & on self-service’, but requests were ‘lost or not confirmed’. For goodness sake, place the resident at the centre of this transaction!

When logging a repair request, our systems/diagnosis tools are perfectly capable of alerting us to two repairs logged within a short time, or perhaps three or more of the same trade (eg Damp or Heating), across perhaps x months. These point to a need for a Pre-inspection automatically being needing to be raised, to diagnose a bigger underlying issue properly. Eg repeat dampness issues could point to a minor roof or guttering issue. Solve that quickly it’s a £500 patch up. Leave it a year and it’s all going to cost the RSL many times that, unexpectedly from the HRA/capital budget. A later more extensive repair then impacts tenants even more.

While we are at it, firm appointments need to be available. These might come from our internal contractor trade workforce, or maybe an external contractor that we have agreed capacity/slots available. If your organisation cannot provide this, ask why not. Are you missing the scheduling ICT solutions, or do your contractors effectively control the client (not the usual way around)?

Is the resident informed if ‘follow on’ or ‘follow up’ work might be expected? Most of the residents I encounter on Twitter, are not informed, in many cases they are even in doubt if they have an active repair logged, never mind the target date of when some contractor operative will appear to sort the issue. Build solutions to allow booking and (the resident themselves) picking the follow-on appointment, on the tenants doorstep.

All solutions I would advocate as suitable to manage repairs, deal with disabilities/vulnerabilities, although clearly many RSL’s are not correctly recording residents as such. So these residents do not benefit from any additional consideration etc. If you have these facilities, get your data up to date and working for everyone’s benefit.

Communication (or lack of it) in the preferred form for the resident, is crucial. Where a letter is preferred or a txt/email, automated right, it keeps everyone in the loop. Silence just creates anxiety, or extra waste calls into your service centre. Most tenants I encounter have poor communication with their landlords or rarely in the form agreed/requested. Staff face to face relationships with residents are not always easy to support these post-covid19 days, but can be that valuable glue to keep the customer relationship together. Smoother customer relationships, make for more efficient transactions, reduced costs, elimination of many unnecessary and expensive complaints. 

A lot of the better housing management solutions these days, allow any organisation staff member, to view a 360 degree view of all related tenant activity. There’s no excuse for say arrears staff to not check/progress or log a repair concern, while on a visit. Silos exist no longer in the system, maybe just in our teams heads, who ‘have always done it, that old way’.

Lastly, use the collation of satisfaction feedback of what residents thought of each piece of service being delivered, as a valuable means of improving and streamlining processes. Used correctly, these will pinpoint where things need tweaking or difficult management decisions are necessary, using data (not mere opinions). I have learned over the years, ultimately its hard to argue with facts. The fact is that listening to resident experiences sincerely and acting upon them (not just collating the KPI), will pay dividends, make better use of budgets and improve everyone’s repairs experience.

Also, it will prevent some ‘poster boy’ social housing landlords, be outed on (I)TV, painting the rest of the sector, particularly the ones sincerely putting in good technology, to give the very best of an effective repairs service, to customers.

Related Post: In our projects, don't we deserve the best - The A-team if you will....

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Joy Division/Warsaw – Failures.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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