Meeting documents

The Repairs and Logistics Manager reported that she had been managing the repairs team since January 2018.  Detailed that she had been looking into the performance of the team and their working practices as some of the team were not working as they should be. This was put down to a lack of training within the team to use the systems properly. This had now been addressed and was now looking at the call centre side of the operation. The Call Centre took between 1,000-1,500 calls a month plus 500 emails requesting additional work which was quite hefty work for 3 part time members of staff.

 In the summer work progressed on integrating the staff at the DLO with staff at the call centre, this added resilience to the team and cut down on the waiting time for tenants. The positive outcome of this was that the call centre abandon rate had been reduced  from  48% to 5%. The number of calendar days from  tenants ringing up to report a problem to  the completion of a job had also come down to 5.7 days. The team were also working on a same day service which enabled tenants to have their jobs completed on the day that they rung in. The service seemed to be working well with the tenants in Sheltered Accommodation who were at home a lot more.

The only obstacles found were that some tenants still needed to plan in visits and did not want jobs planned in on the day they rung in.

The next process was to educate tenants on how to book online for their repairs.  The benefits of this were that you were not waiting in a call queue and once you had reported your fault an operative would call you to make an appointment. A session that we had been trialling over the last month was closing the repairs line for 1 hour at lunch time and the last half an hour at the end of the working day just to try and help tenants to go in the direction of reporting on line which is available 24/7. Emergency calls would still be answered. This had increased the online service by 40% which was really positive. Having fed this back we were going to increase the closing of the repairs line for a little bit longer, not only does this help the team but helps give the tenants the support that they needed. We had also been given training to the Estates Officers to help report faults when they do their visits, this would open up different avenues for people to report faults/repairs. Online reporting is the way forward.

Comments made during the discussion included:-

·         What about the options for people that did not have good internet connections or go  online? We live in a rural area, does this not have an impact on your same day? service?

Yes there was an impact there and what we were trying to do is manage it in any way that we could. There would still be an element of tenants being able to call in at  certain times of the day. There would also be extra support out in the community with the Estate Officers.

·         Did we have a system that allows us to call up a property and see all the works that have been carried out on that property?  Information in the Tenants Talk or cards that people can put in the post would be good also the phone message stating time to call needed to be clear. 

The current system we are using is not brilliant. A new IT system will be implemented next year, this would help us to interrogate the system and would also help the tenant.

We will come back in 3 months with a further update on this.

Members requested to see the new DLO building. Steve Clark will arrange this.