Is your team slow to respond to tenant work order requests? If so, continue reading to learn three ways to improve response time to tenant work orders.
When tenants have a problem, they expect it to be fixed immediately. If it takes days or weeks for your team to fix even simple problems, your property will fall far short of tenant expectations. That leads to dissatisfied tenants. And dissatisfied tenants leads to less lease renewals.
You can improve response time to tenant work order requests by having an efficient work order process with clear performance expectations. To do this, you need to set service benchmarks, prioritize work orders, and be able to address work orders from anywhere.
Read on to find out how you can create an efficient process to improve your tenant work order response time.
1. Create service benchmarks
The first step to improve response time to tenant work order requests is to set clear benchmarks.
Without expected benchmarks for how long work orders should take to resolve, your team won’t know how quickly they need to address problems. A fast response time to one team member could mean five days. For another, it could be five minutes. So, you need to set clear expectations that define what the “fast” benchmark is.
Plus, having benchmarks helps you know which team members are underperforming. Without a standard measurement of performance, it can be difficult to compare individual team members or to see which ones are responding slowly to work orders. That means you can’t correct the problem since you don’t know the cause. Clear performance benchmarks – such as time to complete work orders and completion rates – give you a standard way to measure your team. Likewise, your team will know how quickly they need to get work orders done to keep your tenants happy.
While you could create these expectations in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, this makes it hard to track how your team is doing. An easier way is to use work order management software that can automatically track team performance against your benchmarks. That way, you always know how long work orders are taking – so you can make sure it’s fast enough to retain tenants.
2. Prioritize work orders
Another way to improve response time to tenant worker order requests is by prioritizing your work orders.
You and your team often have many work orders that need to be addressed at any given moment. So, you might respond to work orders in the order they come in. Or, your team might resolve work orders depending on what’s easiest to fix.
But, haphazardly addressing work orders like this can decrease tenant satisfaction. For example, one tenant could submit a work order about a light bulb that needs to be changed. And another tenant could put in a work order for a broken HVAC system in the middle of summer.
The light bulb tenant might have submitted the work order an hour before the other tenant. So, your team fixes that work order first. As a result, they don’t have time to fix the issue on the other work order until tomorrow. This leaves your tenant sweltering for longer than necessary because work orders weren’t prioritized by urgency.
If your tenants have to wait days for big problems like HVAC issues to be resolved, they’re going to look for another property that ensures a comfortable environment. You need to create a system that prioritizes work orders by urgency. When you get work order requests, you should immediately sort them by what needs to be fixed immediately – and what can wait. While you can do this manually, it can add hours to your already busy weekly schedule.
An easier way to prioritize work orders is to use work order software that automatically sorts work orders for you. As soon as the request comes in, the software assigns it a priority level based on the categories you set. So, your team knows exactly what to address first – helping them respond to work orders faster. And keep tenants happier.
3. Manage by exception
Along with setting benchmarks and prioritizing work orders, you can improve response time by managing by exception.
Your team has to manage many work orders at once. So, if one work order takes longer than expected, other work orders are thrown off schedule. This means that those tenant issues take longer to resolve – reducing tenant satisfaction.
And some of your engineers might be overworked – while others have little to do. You assign the same amount of work to each engineer. But some work orders take longer or are more complicated than others. So, if an engineer has multiple complex work orders, your engineer is likely working much harder than other engineers – hurting overall efficiency and team morale.
Instead, you can manage by exception – which allows you to see how long each work order is taking. With this visibility, you can see if an engineer is taking longer than expected on any work order. That way, you can reassign the engineer’s other work orders to other engineers with free time.
So, if one work order takes longer to complete, all the other work orders aren’t pushed back. This helps you always complete work orders on time. On-time delivery can help you please tenants and improve tenant retention.
Improve response time to tenant work orders
Resolving work orders quickly is crucial to high tenant satisfaction. If tenants have to wait days or weeks for you to fix even small problems, they’re going to look for a new building that addresses their concerns quickly. Losing these tenants can negatively impact your building revenue.
So, it’s important to improve response time to work order requests to keep tenants happy. You can do this by setting service benchmarks that help your team fix problems quickly. And you should prioritize work orders so that the most urgent problems are solved first. Plus, your team should be able to address work orders from anywhere – instead of wasting time going back to their desk.
The easiest way to implement these changes is with work order software, which helps you set and track benchmarks. And it can automatically prioritize every work order for you. Plus, a mobile app can help your team address work orders from anywhere with up-to-date info on the go.
Learn how work order management software helps one property team master work order management.
