So you call up the housing repairs team and wait on the phone. Then they tell you to write down a reference number and to supply more images by email.

At the end of it all, you wonder why you didn’t just report it online in the first place…

Surely resetting your password for the umpteenth time would have been faster, right?

This is a familiar situation taken from our interviews with 80 residents from councils across England. 

When we asked residents why they don’t use existing report-a-repair online services, it was often down to one thing: having to remember and enter a username and password.

Call centres aren’t quicker

Oustanding housing repairs is a real source of stress and frustration for many.

We don’t want to worry about repairs. We want to report them as quickly as possible and be confident that it will be fixed in the next few days.

Logins create barriers and those barriers push us towards more easily accessible routes – like a phone call (or an email).

But calling isn’t quicker, it takes an average of 18 minutes to report by phone (with a 9-minute waiting time) and is often only available 9-5. So you’ll just have to wait until opening hours to make that report.

Better make a note…

…or adopt an online portal that removes the inconvenience of requiring a login – where you can enter all the information you need and get that reference number (emailed to you too) at a time that suits you. 

Whether it’s 8 AM or 3 AM (we aren’t judging) you can rest easy knowing your report has been received and will be addressed as soon as possible.

This option takes the stress away from residents who might struggle to call during working hours or who struggle to remember to call.

We need an accessible and inclusive solution

Some of the most vulnerable people in society live in social housing. They’re reliant on others, like family members, wardens or other support networks. Removing the login opens the door for members of that support network to report repairs on a resident’s behalf. 

Additionally, our research shows that people who have accessibility needs or are not native English speakers can struggle with the demands of a telephone call.  

For them, it’s easier to log something online with accessibility tools such as screen readers, increased font size and built-in translators. We’re pleased to say that our wording and journey have been tested and built with these user groups in mind.  

We’re not suggesting we do away with phone calls entirely. Of course, some users will need to report a repair by telephone. 

Additionally, offering an online housing repairs portal as a preferred option frees up other channels reducing call wait times for those who need to use this method of contact. 

Misconceptions about a login-free platform

From our extensive research, we know that login-free, passwordless access to an online housing repairs reporting tool is the solution residents prefer.

For housing managers, many have invested in technology and digital service adoption campaigns to drive users to online reporting over manually monitored channels such as emails and call centres to cut down operating costs and increase efficiencies of teams, allowing officers to focus more on scheduling and repairs, than recording and triaging inbound requests.

Yet, while we’ve all come to accept single sign-on (SSO) and praised its ease of use when it comes to logging into numerous digital platforms, passwordless access to online portals is often met with skepticism.

Below we’ve addressed two common misconceptions when it comes to login-free access.

Misconception 1: Won’t users abuse the service?

A common scenario we often address is the assumption that residents will want to report multiple issues, including non-repair-related ones. 

This could be, for example, spamming the service with general enquiries such as who their councillor is, when the bins are being emptied and so on. Yet, our research showed that 95% of all enquiries by phone to repairs teams were related to a repair. Research shows that having this kind of information freely available on your website will help reduce calls related to general enquiries by 29%. 

Misconception 3: It won’t cut down calls

From the research, we believe that we could increase digital uptake of 40-75% based on feedback from residents about an online housing repairs reporting platform and their own digital habits/ literacy. 

Currently, less than 20% of users report a housing repair online – this is due to:

• Lack of knowledge about the platform/ its existence 
• The need for a login and other details
• The misconception that calling is faster
• A lack of understanding of tenant/ landlord responsibilities

These issues can be tackled by ensuring there is adequate education on the platform and tenant/ landlord responsibilities, which I’ve covered in the next section.

But what I find really surprising is that currently, 40% of all calls are follow-ups about existing repairs – suggesting very high levels of failure demand which could easily be rectified through the features we’ve built into our platform such as:

• Reference numbers and email updates  to track the progress of a repair and reduce calls to request updates
• The ability for residents to choose, change and cancel their appointments to reduce missed appointments
• The ease of accessing all this information through a login-free system and email updates

Misconception 4: Users won’t adopt a system they don’t get

Combining our research with numerous journal articles reviewing the adoption of online portals, we’ve yet to see any evidence that users won’t use an online portal or a login-free approach. 

In fact, the data suggests that so long as there is trust between the council and residents and users are made aware of the existence and purpose of the platform, they will use it for its intended purpose especially if it’s easier to use and more accessible than other forms of reporting housing repairs.

As part of onboarding new councils, we also make recommendations on how those councils can inform users about the platform to help with adoption and channel shift – freeing up manned channels for more urgent requests and repairs work.

Promotion is the key to adoption

As mentioned in Misconception 4, making sure your tenants are aware of the online service is key to adoption. 

How can you encourage them to use it? 

What information and help do they need?  

Look at all the usual touch points, like rent statements, tenant sign-up, IVR (interactive voice response) messaging and use these to promote the online service. 

From user research, I’ve seen that people are more likely to trust a phone call over using an online tool. So explain how this tool can be trusted to get things logged and fixed. Promote the services to others in the community, like the sheltered housing wardens – can they show residents how to use it or be encouraged to use it on their residents’ behalf?  

Also, consider the complete journey. If your existing online repairs service results in a phone call to agree on an appointment time, this only encourages the tenant to ring up next time. Confidence in an authority’s digital maturity is built by showing residents a complete online journey that leaves them informed of what’s happening next.

If you’re thinking of putting in place an online repair service it’s time to weigh up the pros and cons of having a login. The best way to do this is to get out and speak to the people who matter the most: those who’ll be using it.

Learn more about our login-free online housing repairs reporting software

The post Reporting housing repairs online: why no login boosts adoption appeared first on Made Tech.

In this blog post, we want to share how our Housing Repairs product addresses your communal repairs needs. We’ll also look at the user research insights that contributed to these features, and what we’re doing next to make our communal repairs features as useful as possible. 

Support for communal repairs means councils can now provide a complete housing repairs service with our product, covering all non-urgent repair needs. You can read more about the Housing Repairs product more generally in our Housing Repairs announcement blog post.

It was important we added support for communal areas quickly because 20 to 40% of reports made to local authorities are about communal areas. 

Housing repair reports for all areas

When we launched Housing Repairs, it supported reports for repair needs within residents’ private dwellings. Now we support reports from all communal areas, including:

• shared entrances
• lifts
• corridors
• stairwells
• external grounds

Shared entrances, external lighting and lifts and similar areas directly impact the safety and accessibility of their buildings, bringing peace of mind to residents.

How research insights have shaped the product

“If we haven’t got an exact location, that is a killer.“ 

customer support officer

Our user research highlighted that it’s vital for local authorities to get the precise location of the repair need when the report is first made. We’ve extended the reporting flow to prompt and make it easy for the resident by:

• asking the resident if the issue is in a communal area, guiding them into a specific communal flow
• helping the resident identify the specific building with the repair need, which they can choose from a list based on a post code they provide
• providing the full range of possible communal repair locations for the resident to choose from
• prompting the user to provide details of the specific location of the repair need, giving them plenty of space to go into detail

Our Housing Repairs product was designed to help local authorities save time and money by reducing reports that come in by phone. It also reduces the need for follow-up calls and pre-inspections. These new features extend these benefits to the full range of repair reports, allowing further cost and time savings. 

Needs addressed

Here’s a bit more detail on insights we gained from our user research. We ran extensive research with local authorities and end users to understand the main communal repair needs we could address. There was a wealth of insights – more than we can detail here – but here are some of the highlights.

Resident needs

Among other insights, our user research found that residents:

• often need to get in touch more than once before an issue is fixed
• are sometimes passed back and forth between local authorities and repairs suppliers
• can feel timeframes are unclear, and issues take too long to resolve
• often find that the status of a repair request is unclear, and that they aren’t informed when issues are fixed
• face long wait teams when call volumes are high
• can resent waiting on the line only to be passed to a contractor

Local authority needs

We found that local authorities:

• can struggle with high call volumes for repair reports about communal areas, pulling agents away from other important work
• face inefficiencies caused by duplicate reports of the same issue from different residents
• lack the information they need to address the communal problem first time
• find that their call centre agents often have to act as a go-between for residents and contractors
• often don’t have access to the contractor’s repair status to be able to keep residents informed

All of these needs can be addressed with a good digital service that supports residents in accurately reporting a repair need, and which helps them access the status of a repair job.

Next steps

Though we’re very confident Housing Repairs does a great job of supporting communal repair needs, there’s more we want to do to make our support for communal repairs as useful as possible. Further needs we mean to address include:

• letting residents know an issue has already been reported
• letting residents know the status of a repair request
• making sure residents, local authorities and repair contractors have access to the same, up-to-date information

Some of the specific features we’re considering include:

• detecting when a report could be a duplicate and alerting the local authority
• updating repair statuses in a dashboard, with updates automatically sent out to interested reportees
• providing residents with a view of all outstanding repairs in their building, with an estimated repair date
• allowing the resident to flag a late repair with the local authority if the due date has passed
• providing feedback links with notifications

Book a demo

Our communal repairs update is one example of how we’re following through on our commitment to building continually-improving SaaS products. As councils face increasing budgetary stresses, SaaS products present an opportunity to provide services which move with the times, for an affordable, predictable flat fee.

If you’d like to see how our Housing Repairs product can help save your organisation time and money, request a demo via our Housing Repairs page.

The post How we’re shaping our Housing Repairs product to address communal repair needs appeared first on Made Tech.

Update, July 2023: Housing Repairs now supports communal repairs. Tenants, leaseholders and housing officers can report communal repairs with our product. Book a demo. Read the blog post.

We’re really excited to share this. It’s something quite new and different to what we’ve done before. Rather than working with different councils on individual housing repair services, we think it makes much more sense to build one application to address this common need. We’re really keen to hear what you think.

We’ve made a video about it, which includes some screen grabs of what it looks like. Take a look:

Benefit from the user research we’ve already done

The great thing about taking a SaaS approach is that anyone can benefit from the groundwork we’ve already done. User research is a good example. 

We’ve done heaps of user research to make the product as easy to use as possible. That includes research with community groups representing people with lower digital literacy. (Thank you to everyone who took part. You’ve helped make this a much better product.)

We’ve designed the product using the GOV.UK Service Standard. And as a result of this research, we’ve done other things to make the product as easy to use as possible, including simplifying words wherever we can.

One thing we’ve tried and decided against is the kind of interface where you show users a picture of a room and ask them to select the object or area where there’s a problem. Though this may sound like an easy way for some people to report a problem, there are accessibility issues with asking users to interact this way – for example, for people with a visual disability. 

The effort we’ve applied to making the product as accessible as possible means that the online service is usable by many more people. That’s quicker and easier for them, but also frees up your people’s time from answering phone calls and emails to focus more on your priorities. 

And because this is a proper SaaS product, you won’t need to spend time understanding, maintaining or upgrading the product. We’ll do all of that.

Why we’ve gone the SaaS route

In case you’re not familiar with software as a service, these are applications that live in the cloud, and which are maintained and improved by the provider (in this case: us). They operate on a simple pay-as-you-go basis, and our housing repairs product is no different.

We think a SaaS product makes so much sense for solving housing repair needs. It’s a cheaper alternative to either building a new bespoke service, or making do with an out-of-date system. 

And it makes things simple for you (the local authority). Because it’s SaaS, you pay a single flat fee. There are no add-ons or preferential rates. The costs are predictable. You don’t need to worry about maintaining it (because we do that bit). 

Like all SaaS products, our housing repairs tool is never finished: we’ll go on improving it based on new insights and the feedback we hear from you. Everyone will see those updates roll out at the same time. There’s no extra cost for those updates – it wouldn’t really be a SaaS product if we did that.

It takes a little time and effort to set up, probably a day or 2, which we’ll help with. After that, updates should just work, with no more tinkering needed. But we have support on hand in case, provided by the people at Made Tech that actually built it.

This isn’t finished – and we’d love your help

We’ve already learned an awful lot while building this product. As we’ve mentioned, we’ve learned that a lot of the existing assumptions about what makes a good repairs service need challenging based on what the user research shows us.

But at the same time, this product isn’t finished, and it never will be. We’re pretty sure the product as it stands can help councils around the UK, but we want to hear from as many people as possible about how it can be improved to better meet the needs of local authorities and their residents.

One area still up for discussion is the possibility of doing away with logins, which we’ve done in the product as it now stands. There’s a lot of evidence to support this decision, as logins create a barrier to entry that turns some users away.

We’ve heard some arguments against, and the assumptions behind these are potential areas for further user research. But this is an area where we’re keen to hear from more people, so please do come to have a chat with us. 

Another feature we’re thinking about is image uploads. There’s some evidence that letting residents snap a quick photo of the problem to upload with their report can help local authorities accurately diagnose the issue and reduce the need for repeat callouts. We’re testing a prototype in our latest round of user research.

This is our first SaaS product, but watch this space. Head of Research Robin Wyles and team are hard at work in their batcave as we speak.

See a demo

We haven’t gotten around to making a full demo video of the housing repairs product yet, as we’ve been doing some last-minute tweaks. But if you’d like to take a look at the end-to-end journey, we can jump on a quick call with you to do a live demo. That way you can ask any questions you have, or let us know where we’re going wrong (and we’ll put our case to the contrary, if we have one!) Just give us a shout via the contact form on our housing repairs product page.

The post We’ve made a new SaaS product for residents to report housing repairs appeared first on Made Tech.