Are You Communicating Enough With Maintenance Requests?

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As a property manager, it’s important your residents have their maintenance issues efficiently and effectively resolved. Therefore, you must ensure your office staff and maintenance professionals exhibit strong communication skills to keep residents and each other informed about progress on work orders. Here are three ways you can improve communication regarding maintenance requests for your tenants.

Train Office Staff on Communicating With Residents and Maintenance

Staff should know specific questions to ask residents to determine the nature and severity of an issue and more efficiently schedule work orders. Also, staff should spend a day shadowing a maintenance professional to better understand what details maintenance needs to effectively complete a work order and not have to come back with additional tools or information.

Train Maintenance on Communicating with Residents

Maintenance should speak with residents in a respectful manner that clearly conveys a message in language they understand and thoroughly resolves an issue. Also, maintenance should respond to requests within 24 hours, let residents know when the issue should be fixed by and finish the work as quickly as possible. If additional time is needed due to waiting on a part, needing additional resources or having an emergency arise, maintenance should let residents know as soon as possible what the new timeframe is for resolving the issue. In addition, maintenance should ensure that residents understand why the issue arose and what steps they can take to prevent future occurrences. Furthermore, maintenance should follow up with residents two or three days later to ensure the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.

Implement an Automated System

Residents can place work orders and an office staff member can schedule maintenance requests. Maintenance professionals can view each work order and provide the resident and staff member with progress on resolving the issue and an estimated time of completion. Work orders can easily be scheduled in order of priority, ensuring every issue gets resolved and documenting the parts used, labor hours spent, costs and other important information for future budgeting and repairs. 

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