Reimagining housing repairs in the London Borough of Redbridge

Challenge

Local government is seeing huge challenges in housing repairs services. With Tenant Satisfaction Measures and new regulatory demands on repairs teams, many local authorities, like their housing association counterparts are turning to software solutions to automate parts of their process, promoting self-serve over reliance on contact centre to save costs.

London Borough of Redbridge’s story starts at the beginning of the pandemic, when lockdown greatly impacted their ability to address repairs. This resulted in a growing backlog of repairs and frustrated residents who relied on calling the contact centre to report issues or complain about the service. Without a self-serve system in place, all repairs, complaints, appointments and follow-ups were done over the phone resulting in Redbridge’s team becoming inundated with demands.

The growing backlog and demands on the service, coupled with the incoming regulatory changes meant that Redbridge had to find a solution and fast. Relying solely on the contact centre was becoming financially unviable and without the resources to meet the demand, a software solution was needed to unburden the team and build confidence between the residents and the repairs team.

We needed an online housing repairs service that would work smoothly for our citizens and fit around their everyday lives. With Made Tech’s help, we’ve now got exactly that.

Tom Harrison
Programme Director at Redbridge

Our approach

Working closely with the team at Redbridge and their other suppliers, Repairs (Made Tech Housing’s online reactive repairs management system) was deployed to bring down the cost of managing repairs.

With Repairs, Redbridge was able to offer an accessible repair reporting system to their residents allowing them to book, manage and track their repairs online saving time and reducing reliance on the repairs team.

Further integrations with Redbridge’s workforce management software and scheduler meant that residents were able to book their repair and choose a date, while repairs teams only needed to look over the details of the repair in their system without any additional admin or follow-up.

Our user-friendly, and optimised question flow and photo upload also meant that repairs team had the right information they needed to effectively triage, prioritise and action a repair without needing to contact the resident contributing to higher first-time fix rates.

As we mentioned, Redbridge needed to deploy a solution fast, by running off Made Tech Housing’s public cloud infrastructure and integrating with the Mears contract management system (MCM), the project took just weeks from initiation to go live.

Results we achieved together

Out of the first 116 repairs booked through the platform, 79 were booked during office hours, while 37 were booked out of hours. 70% of these users reported repairs from mobile devices – helping free up staff time and get tenants’ repairs sorted much quicker.

The product has already helped the council by:

• improving the way housing repairs are booked by users online
• reducing failure demand and lead-time-to-repair
• supporting the repair service to run more efficiently
• increasing confidence and take-up of digital services
• improving resident satisfaction by creating a 24/7 accessible service

What’s next

As a customer, Redbridge will be an integral part of future product development, helping us understand the changing challenges their housing team faces, particularly around areas like data.

Along with our other customers, Redbridge will join a growing community of practice around our growing housing platform, where we’ll share learnings and encourage open feedback. With frequent updates delivered at no extra cost, Redbridge’s housing repairs service will continue to serve evolving user needs.

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