Where to start? Repairs?

It’s no secret that repairs reporting and appointment management are critical transactional services in a social housing customer portal. Repairs is the service most frequently requested by customers, accounting for up to 70% of inbound calls. But it’s also a challenge, with organisations across the sector seeing an increase in repairs requests at the same time as they suffer rising costs and a shortage in workforce and materials.

Online repairs services are a big pull in terms of customers registering for an online account with their landlord. Data shows that a good online repairs offering has a direct impact on the use of other transactional services in a housing portal, such as making payments, Direct Debit sign ups, and statement downloads.

At Active Housing we provide the sector’s most feature rich end-to-end online diagnostics tool (including self appointing), Active Diagnostics. We also offer a number of optional modules which can be seamlessly integrated into your existing portal and back office systems (e.g. HMS, Scheduler, etc.) with no, or minimal involvement from your existing portal provider.

This means that in as little as a month your current portal could offer:

• Comprehensive repairs diagnostics
• Self-fix information and videos
• Temporary measure and H&S information
• Muti-repair booking with time saving appointment grouping
• Appointment self-selection integrating with a scheduling system
• Appointment tracking with cancel and reschedule facility
• Feedback capture
• Appointment reminders with amendment options

What else can we do? 

Repairs is not the only area of a portal that can be improved through 3rd party assistance. Here are a few examples of other ways you could look to improve your current portal.

Accessibility

Ensuring your portal is accessible is essential not only for adoption but also to meet regulations. There are many free online tools and suppliers that can assess your portal and sometimes simple changes such as colour contrasts and font sizes can make a big difference.

There are also a number of specialist accessibility tools such as Browsealoud (now called Reachdeck) and ReciteMe that can easily be implemented on your portal, enabling functionality such as direct translation and read aloud, and where users already have such tools installed on their device or browser, it’s important that your portal supports them.

Payments

Many organisations utilise payment gateway providers, such as Pay360 and Allpay, as part of a portal offering. A payment gateway which takes a customer away from the portal to a separate browser tab or window is not an optimal user experience and can cause users to worry about the legitimacy of the gateway.

A better option is to look for payment providers that offer an API or Embeddable option. This will allow customers to make payments without leaving the portal, providing a much better user experience.

It’s also worth ensuring that the payment provider offers additional functionality like storing card details to make repeat payments as easy as possible for customers.

Applications / Pre-tenancy

We often talk about digital self-service in the context of existing customers transacting online. However, there is a big opportunity to digitise the pre-tenancy process to make efficiency savings, simplify the process for potential customers, and ensure all new customers are digital from day one.

In an ideal world a portal should handle both pre-tenancy and existing customer accounts. But where that’s not possible, there is an opportunity to use specialist providers or products to just handle pre-tenancy self-service. This could range from advertising properties and CBL property offers, to application forms and digital signing of the tenancy agreements.

To arrange a demonstration of the Active Housing product suite, and how it can help you get more out of your existing product, do not hesitate to contact us at sales@activehousing.co.uk.