How we increased the number of cases closed on time by 34%

As Area Manager, one of my main responsibilities is to ensure that our tenants are happy and safe in their homes. However, everyone knows that asset management involves a lot of balls in the air, and with so many tasks and responsibilities, it can be a challenge to keep track of everything and ensure that problems are addressed in a timely manner.

In our case, we had a situation where the janitors were flagging that the workload had increased and said it was difficult to close all the work orders they received in time. I myself had little insight into how many cases were coming in and how many we managed each week. It was complicated and time-consuming to get a picture of the business, whether we were understaffed or something else had happened.

A deep dive into this took too long, I simply did not have the opportunity to follow up on it on as regular a basis as I would like.

One of the reasons we decided to test Homepal was to see if we could get better visibility into the case management. I wanted to ensure the following:

• That we had sufficient staffing so that employees are not overloaded and that we have the capacity to deliver to the customer

• That we plan the time of the caretakers in an optimal way in relation to the type of work orders they are dealing with.

• That we prioritize work orders in the right order

• That we both deliver and provide feedback to the customer on time.

Homepal helped us with exactly which KPIs to look at to answer the above questions, and exactly what data we would need for each.

By looking at the average over time, I could quickly get an idea that the number of cases had not actually increased despite the fact that the caretakers did not have as much time. It turned out that the type of case and location affected our planning and it became clear that it needed to be reviewed.

We have three levels of cases: Level 1 is an emergency, such as water spraying somewhere, where someone has to fix the problem within an hour. At levels 2 and 3, we try to provide feedback the same day or the next day, but we have one or two working weeks to fix the problem. We are usually faster than that, so these guidelines are not always communicated to customers.

For me, the most important thing is to set the right expectations with the customer. My experience is that customers are patient as long as they are told when we can fix the problem, whereas we get more calls to customer service if they just wait without feedback. If we say it will take a week, that's fine, but if the customer hasn't heard anything in three days, they'll call and ask what's going on.

With new insights into our case management, I decided to implement a small reform. With clearer communication with tenants and better planning of the janitors' time, we would increase customer satisfaction, lower our resource costs and reduce the stress of our own staff.

• The customer service staff determines the level of the case according to pre-determined criteria and informs the customer that the property manager will get back to them within 24 hours.

• The janitor provides feedback and makes an appointment for action.

• With better insight into the case statistics, better planning became possible for the caretakers.

I also realized that the data we have does not fully reflect reality - sometimes cases are not closed even though they are completed. When I discovered this, I showed the team what the statistics looked like in Homepal. Once they saw how the stats were dropping when cases are not closed, this issue has been greatly reduced. Seeing something in a picture is so much clearer than just hearing someone say that it's important to get procedures and processes right.

The most important difference between now and then is that we actually know what it looks like now. We can work more data-driven than before, which makes it easier to make decisions. Once we had this insight, we were able to re-plan and allocate resources where needed, which made a big difference for us. As much as 34% more cases are closed on time, not counting obvious outliers where the case is completed but not closed in the system."

In summary, by using Homepal as a data collection tool, we were able to get a better overview of our case management and thus implement improvements that made both tenants and staff more satisfied. With clearer communication and better planning, we have been able to reduce stress and increase the efficiency of our property managers while creating a better experience for our tenants. Homepal has enabled this positive change by giving us the tool to collect and analyze data in an easy and transparent way.