Does your work order system make it easy to complete work and provide a great tenant experience?
Closing out work orders quickly is crucial to keeping your building in top shape. Otherwise, small issues could go unaddressed until they become major issues – which are more costly to resolve. A slow work order process could be costing your building thousands of unnecessary replacement and repair expenses.
And, resolving work orders quickly is important to creating a positive tenant experience. Tenants expect prompt service in every area – including work orders. If your team takes days or weeks to resolve issues, tenants are going to think your response is too slow – reflecting badly on your building.
Slow work order resolution could cause tenants to leave for another building – costing you revenue.
How can you maintain your property and deliver a good tenant experience?
By having a work order system that allows you to efficiently address every work order. That way, you can complete maintenance quickly – while expending less effort. And, you can deliver exceptional service to tenants – increasing tenant satisfaction.
Wondering what an efficient work order system looks like? Here are 5 areas your work order system should focus on – to maintain your building and provide a great experience for tenants.
1. On-Time Delivery
Meeting – or exceeding – expectations is key to creating a positive tenant experience. As such, one area your work order system should prioritize is on-time delivery.
Completing work orders late is guaranteed to create a negative experience for tenants. When you tell your tenants you’ll do something by a certain date, they expect you to follow through.
If you don’t, tenants will associate your building with subpar, late service. They’ll have little incentive to renew their lease – especially when many buildings have excellent service. Instead of retaining tenants, you’ll have to find new tenants or have a high vacancy rate. Either option will cost you revenue – leading to a less profitable building.
How can you always complete work orders on time? By creating a work order system that makes it effortless to prioritize, address, and close out work orders.
You could do this by manually sorting, prioritizing, and assigning work orders in a spreadsheet or word doc. But, this process is time-consuming – requiring you to manage every single work order.
Or, you could use work order software, which automatically prioritizes work orders. So, you can quickly see which work orders need to be completed on any given day to be on time.
Plus, work order software can communicate with tenants to let them know when their work order will be completed. That way, you always know what tenants expect – and how to meet those expectations.
Ensuring every work order is completed on time is one crucial area your work order system needs to focus on to increase tenant satisfaction.
2. Ease of Use
Another area your work order system should focus on is ease of use for tenants. That way, the work order process is a good experience for tenants.
If your work order system is hard for tenants to use, they’re going to put off submitting work orders. This results in tenants being dissatisfied with your building because problems are never addressed. And, it can allow small problems to go unresolved until equipment breaks – requiring you to replace it entirely.
The solution? Make it easy for tenants to log work orders by allowing them to submit work orders through multiple channels – like text or email. And, when tenants submit work orders, follow up with them to answer any questions they have. That way, they can submit work orders with tech they already have – and have the opportunity to ask additional questions.
Another important aspect of making your work order system easy for tenants to use is collecting tenant feedback. The only way to know if your work order system is easy to use is to ask tenants what they think of it. You can use suggestions they have to make your work order system more tenant-friendly – leading to high tenant satisfaction.
While you could implement these changes manually – like checking many different communication channels – it can be a lot to manage on top of everything else you have to do. Work order software can manage multiple communications methods for you. That way, you save time – while still providing a top-notch tenant experience.
Your work order system should focus on being user friendly – so tenants have the best experience possible.
3. Benchmark Tracking
Along with on-time delivery and ease of use, your work order system should allow you to set and track benchmarks. That way, you can ensure your team and properties are performing efficiently.
It’s important to make sure work orders are completed on time and with high quality. But, it’s hard to know how work order completion is performing if you don’t have benchmarks. Without clear expectations, work orders could take a long time to complete – and be poorly done.
This wastes your resources – since your team spends so long on each work order. And, it makes tenants unhappy with your service because it takes forever to get problems addressed. These issues can result in lost revenue – due to high operating expenses and revenue drops if tenants leave for more responsive buildings.
To prevent this, you need to set targets for work order completion and quality. That way, you can measure whether your team is performing efficiently. And, if your team is doing quality work.
So, your work order system needs to help you track benchmarks. You can do this by keeping a log of all work orders and completion times. But, manually entering and tracking all that data can take hours each week – meaning you have to sacrifice getting other tasks done.
Work order software can save you time by allowing you to set benchmarks. And, automatically tracking these benchmarks for you. So, it’s easy to see what areas your team is doing well on – and which ones need improvement.
4. On the Go Capabilities
Since your team needs to perform work throughout your building, your work order system needs to have on the go capabilities. That way, your team can get work done wherever they are.
If your team can only follow your work order system while at their desks, it’s not going to be effective. While working throughout your property, your team may forget crucial steps in your work order process – because they can’t take it with them.
This leads to subpar work. Plus, when your team can’t follow your system, you risk neglected equipment that breaks down sooner than it should. And, is less efficient than possible – increasing your operating expenses.
To avoid unnecessary building costs, your work order system should focus on being mobile. So, your team can access your system wherever they are – even if internet isn’t available. This ensures that they’ll be able to follow your system easily.
While you could create print outs that your team has to fill out while they’re addressing work orders, this wastes resources – driving up expenses. And, it’s easily lost, damaged, or forgotten – so you have no idea whether your team actually followed your process.
Work order software can solve this with both desktop and mobile apps – which can be used in areas without internet. For example, your engineers can input labor and materials costs as they calculate them while working throughout your building. So, you know what to bill tenants – instead of eating costs because your engineers couldn’t record info while away from their desks.
Because it’s cloud-based software, you can also access your team’s notes even if their phone or computer is damaged. That way, you always know whether your team is following your process – so you can make changes if needed.
Another important area your work order system should focus on is on the go capabilities.
5. Increased Visibility
The key to a work order system that runs smoothly is visibility. That way, you know exactly what’s happening in every property – and can make changes if needed.
To maximize work order efficiency and tenant satisfaction, you need to know the status of every work order, the performance of your team, and any tenant feedback. Otherwise, you could be letting work orders fall through the cracks. Or, taking forever to complete work. You could even be completing work orders in a way tenants dislike.
Without visibility, you could miss all of those problems – without even knowing it. This could increase your property’s operating expenses due to lost efficiency. And, it could reduce building revenue due to lost tenants.
Keeping track of all those moving parts is a full-time job. But, hiring additional staff to increase visibility is costly. And, putting extra responsibilities on your existing team can lead to poor performance in every area of their jobs.
An easier way to gain visibility is to use work order software – which makes visibility effortless with a dashboard overview. At a glance, you can see which work orders need to be completed, how much work each team member has, and more. So, it’s effortless to see everything to do with work orders.
Visibility is also an important area your work order system should focus on.
Wrapping It Up
Your work order system is crucial to maintaining your building and creating a great tenant experience.
But, not all work order systems focus on the right areas. This could lead to increased operating costs – due to missed preventive maintenance and wasted resources. And, it could cost you revenue – if tenants decide to leave because problems aren’t addressed quickly or completely.
To prevent these problems, your work order system should focus on completing work orders on time and being easy to use for tenants. Your system should also focus on tracking benchmarks, on the go capabilities, and increase visibility. That way, you can efficiently complete work orders – and increase tenant satisfaction.
Looking for work order software than can make managing work orders easier? Consider using Prism. With Prism’s work order module, you can deliver a great tenant experience – while increasing work order efficiency.
Get started with your free Prism work order demo today.
