Southern Maintenance Services, part of Southern Housing Group, is using Oneserve to schedule and manage maintenance appointments by ensuring that its staff are in the right place, at the right time, and with the right skills to complete each repair.
Southern Maintenance Services was created to bring previously outsourced works back in-house at Southern Housing in order to have more control of its repairs operations. The housing group said that repairs were the biggest motivator from a tenant’s point of view so a successful maintenance service was crucial to achieving excellent levels of tenant satisfaction.
Carl Dewey, maintenance services director, Southern Maintenance Services, said, “What customers remember from a ‘wow’ perspective is that they phoned up, we attended quickly, we turned up when we said we would, we fixed the repair because we had the parts in the van and, once we’d finished, a service call was received to check everything was ok.”
The company reported that it had saved around £200,000 within eight months of bringing its repair service in-house, and that end-to-end repairs were now down to eight days, compared with a sector average of around 13 days. During one reporting period, 460 tenants were surveyed and 95 per cent rated the service ‘eight or above’ while 86 per cent rated it ‘10 out of 10’. In addition, the company has achieved a 100 per cent rate for capturing levels of tenant satisfaction with its service by using Oneserve to identify the best time to call tenants for feedback.
