Onsite Insites by SatisFacts Research 2014 - 3rd Quarter | Page 3

at 2pm – 5 tickets. Fifth stop at 4pm – 18 tickets! Who
can possibly resolve 18 tickets before the end of the
business day?
It cannot be stressed enough the importance of entering
in each ticket as they come into the office. If a resident
places a call for service at 10am but the ticket isn’t
entered until 3pm, we have essentially lost 5 hours in
which that request could have been resolved. That
10am ticket may not be resolved until the following
business day, essentially a full 24 hours after the request
was made. In the mind of the resident, that could
equate to 2 full days. Here’s an example:

One of the questions commonly asked throughout our
surveys is “The speed to which your maintenance work
was handled”. So what exactly constitutes a fast
response time? There is usually a disparity between
what the office considers a fast turnaround and what a
resident is comfortable with. Believe it or not, the clock
starts ticking for a resident the moment that service
request is placed. Whether via email, phone call or note
left in the drop box, a resident sees this as the starting
point, which is why it is so crucial for the office and
maintenance teams to be totally in sync with each other
and have in place a streamlined process for handling
service requests.
When I first started as a Leasing Associate, I developed a
great time-management system for tackling all of the
duties I was responsible for throughout the day. One of
my most ingenious techniques came in the form of postit notes. As service requests came in, I would jot them
down on post-it notes and sit them to the side of my
computer. Once I had a good amount of requests and
time to spare, I would enter them into the computer
and put the printed requests in the maintenance inbox.
In some form or another, this was standard practice
throughout the office – everyone did something similar
for their requests.
Those of us in the office never realized the back-up this
created for our maintenance teams. Imagine you are a
Service Tech and throughout the day you stop by the
office to check your inbox for new requests. First stop at
10am – no tickets. Second stop before lunch – no
tickets. Third stop after lunch – no tickets. Fourth stop

Mr. Jones places a request at 10am Monday morning,
but it does not get entered into the system until 3pm
Monday afternoon. Maintenance is not made aware of
the request until 4pm on Monday and therefore could
not resolve it before leaving for the day. The work order
sits until Tuesday when it finally gets resolved sometime
during that day. Mr. Jones is at work when the request
is completed and therefore does not realize the work
was done until he returns home at 7pm Tuesday
evening. Start time: 10am Monday…Finish time: 7pm
Tuesday.
The back-up created by our attempts at time
management affect not only the maintenance process
but the resident’s overall living experience. Do you have
a standard in place for your service requests? If so, does
everyone on your team, from office to maintenance,
know about it and most importantly adhere to it?

OUTLAW THOSE
POST-IT NOTES!
By Lia Nichole Smith,
VP of Education and Consulting,
Lia Nichole Smith
SatisFacts ResearchTM

VP of Education and Consulting
SatisFacts ResearchTM