When it comes to maintenance, the more information you have, the better. You can resolve maintenance issues much quicker if you have a clear idea of what is wrong and what is needed to fix it. Oftentimes, residents can be vague when they submit a maintenance request. By ensuring residents submit photos within their work orders, you can solve various issues within your maintenance process before anything breaks.
Without enough information, your staff will have to spend time trying to get a hold of a resident or waste money by sending a maintenance technician in blind. Many property maintenance portals request photos from residents but see very low percentages of adoption from their residents. By ensuring residents submit photos within their work orders, you can solve various issues within your maintenance process before anything breaks.
Save Time by Improving Efficiency
Manual follow-up, scheduling, and communication are the most time-consuming aspects of the maintenance process. The more information you need to obtain from your resident, the longer it will take for a repair to be completed. Let’s say a resident submits a maintenance request for a broken dishwasher. Many issues could cause this; without any pictures or additional information, you have to call your resident to learn more about the problem. Ending up in a game of phone tag is frustrating for your maintenance team and your residents. The more specific information you can obtain from them upfront eliminates the need for back-and-forth communication, allowing you to schedule the work order and complete the job quickly.
Save Money by Reducing Trip Charges
The more profitable your maintenance process, the happier your property owners will be. Improving efficiency is one of the best ways to ensure maintenance profitability. Using the same example from above, if you receive a maintenance request for a broken dishwasher without any additional information, you may end up sending the wrong vendor, or they may have the incorrect part needed to fix the issue. You may have to pay multiple trip charges wasting your property owner’s money. By ensuring your residents supply images of requested repairs, you can send the right vendor to fix the problem the first time.
Improve Resident and Vendor Relations
The longer a maintenance request takes to be completed, the more frustrated your residents will become. If you constantly call your residents for more information or have to schedule more than one trip, your residents will grow unsatisfied with your maintenance process. It is important to remember that many people choose to rent because they want to avoid the hassles of homeownership. But if your maintenance process is inefficient, they still have to deal with those inconveniences.
In addition to creating a negative experience with your residents, an inefficient process will also affect your vendors. Vendors are extremely busy, often being booked out weeks in advance. If they are given insufficient information about a work order and have to return, their schedule becomes even more crowded. Creating a positive experience with your vendors helps ensure they continue to work with you in the future. With the current labor shortages, maintaining positive relationships with your vendors is more critical than ever.
Create Clear Documentation
Requiring residents to submit photos to work orders increases efficiency and saves money; it also provides you with vital documentation. If there is a dispute about the diligence of your maintenance team or the repair they completed, having before and after photos can save you from being liable. You can protect yourself from a potential lawsuit by proving that a repair was completed promptly and correctly. In addition, images can be helpful to your owners when they approve maintenance requests. By seeing the issue firsthand, owners better understand why work needs to be done and why the vendor bids a specific amount.
Read more here about how to increase business productivity by automating your maintenance process.
