Case Study 3 – Slow Service Responses
The Problem
An office building owner found it increasingly difficult to manage the many ways tenants were using to communicate their service requests to the building manager. Whether it was phone calls, email, notes delivered to the manager’s office or personal visits, there was no way to maintain any standard for timely responses when the requests were arriving in an unstructured manner. This went against everything the owner preached about customer service.
The User’s Solution
When a request was received, the building manager had to enter it in a hand-written logbook. Then he had to call or send a note to the maintenance manager to notify him of the request. Finally, once the service was completed, the maintenance manager had to remember to let the building manager know that the work was finished. This manual process was difficult to track from start to completion, including knowing the interim status of each request and who was working on it.
The FormsTrackR Solution
The building owner used FormsTrackR to create a QR Code that identified the location of every office suite and every restroom. These were posted on the door jamb inside each office suite and restroom. Now, if a tenant needs to initiate a service request, they simply scan the QR code with a smart device, the appropriate form pops up, they enter the requested information and submit it. The form is immediately delivered to the building manager and the maintenance manager. Either one can assume responsibility to fulfill the request, and the system displays this in the request record. This changes the status from Received to In Progress, which makes it easy to ensure that every request is handled by someone and not ignored. When the work is done, the request is closed and the status is changed to Completed. The building manager receives an automatically generated report each morning of the previous day’s service requests and sends it to the building owner. Finally, the form responses become data that can be retrieved for future reference.
What Was Saved?
- The need for logbooks has been eliminated.
- Moreover, the new system reduces the demands on the building manager’s time by automating most of the service process.
What Was Improved?
- Tenants now have a single, simple way to report service requests.
- In many cases they receive an acknowledgment within minutes and a high percentage of issues are resolved in fifteen minutes or less.
- The building manager, maintenance manager and owner all know the status of every service request in real time and have the confidence that no service request will be lost or ignored.