Intelligent housing repair software made simple.

Repairs Diagnostics for the Customer Service Centre

Many social housing providers recognise the need for a dedicated diagnostics tool. It helps their customer contact centre advisors to assist tenants in diagnosing their housing repairs.

A specialist diagnostics repair tool can go beyond the basics of questions, answers and messages. Good tools can use the tenant and property information to look up extra data from the Housing Management System. This personalises the call and means the advisor doesn’t need to ask questions about things the organisation should already know, e.g. who is the tenant’s housing officer; or what make and model of boiler they have. In short, it can add intelligent diagnostic scripting to the tenant interactions. This gives much improved customer service and more satisfying tenant interactions.

A Natural Next Step in Digital Transformation

Historically, using a dedicated repair diagnostics tool was often the start of an organisation’s digital transformation journey. That was progress from giving advisors repairs handbooks and expecting them to remember schedule of rates codes and priorities.

And, starting there, means that the relevant teams have already thought about what the repair process is. They have considered what questions and responses they need to diagnose the repair. In addition, they have already implemented the handling of various repairs.

The natural next step in digital transformation is to offer the same rigorous diagnostic approach through the tenant portal. This was exactly the approach the Melin Homes took, starting with Repairs Diagnostics in the contact centre. Their Housing Management System is OPEN Housing and the portal is OPEN Access. The video shows how they are using Online Diagnostic scripts to offer self-service diagnosis for their tenants.

Important Features for Online Repairs Diagnostics Tools

When choosing a diagnostics tool for your tenant portal, there are few features that you should check for:

• Editing and updating the scripts for both the advisors and tenant self-service portal is simple and the same across both platforms.
• Easy visualisation of the diagnostic scripts for collaborative working, to agree the logic flow.
• Repairs diagnostic scripts can be written once and used in multiple places (called from) other scripts.
• Online presentation of the scripts can include your brand colour schemes, and even incorporate your organisation’s logo.
• The presentation is fully responsive and works just as well on a mobile phone as it does on a desktop screen.
• The online diagnostic tool integrates with the major Housing Management Systems, and even MS Dynamics Power Pages Portals.

However, there are a couple of key pieces of information that the tenant doesn’t see when using an online diagnostic tool. Namely, the selection of the correct SOR code for the job, and the setting of the repair’s priority. Those two pieces of information are passed to the scheduler as part of the works order. But, what they can see are the details of the questions and answers they have submitted, and any associated comments.

Enhancing the Customer Tenant Portal

This is only the beginning for Melin Homes tenant Portal upgrade. Now that the portal includes easily updatable repairs diagnostics scripts, there are some natural next steps:

The first is to extend the number of repairs that can be offered. Nine top level repair categories is more of a starting point for repairs online. Other Housing Associations have twenty plus selectable repair categories, often reflecting a similar variety offered through the contact centre.

The second is to build more personalisation into the diagnostics. The diagnostics tool knows the property, so it can look up when the next scheduled maintenance is on the boiler. In short, it can use intelligent diagnostics.

Thirdly, they can add general self-service enquiries, extending the tenant portal to offer a range of general needs enquiries beyond repairs. This includes everything from rents, ASB reporting, through to any kind of request or application. For example, we have customers using Online Enquiries to build their own onboarding scripts for handling tenancy applications. It prompts dozens of questions and passes back the results to the HMS to process the application.

And finally, a couple of other improvements are to:

1. Include images at the second level of diagnosis (after the top level icons) to improve customer experience.
2. Integrate with the works order scheduler, to give real appointment slots, rather than just preferred times.

However housing organisations start their digital transformation journeys, it’s worth talking to a specialist diagnostic tool provider. They will help to get the most out of building intelligent repairs diagnostics into the tenant portal.