The maintenance phase of building a home is getting an upgrade! To date, builders have relied on paper-based systems and spreadsheets to track maintenance defects and issues. Today’s home building maintenance teams need an intuitive, client-facing digital system as their one source of truth to ensure nothing falls through the gaps — all while delivering a superior customer experience.
For builders, this means having defects and warranty issues accessible 24/7, online from any device, where both builders, and their clients, can keep informed on defect status. That’s where Constructive Maintenance can help: a secure, cloud-based platform that guides your clients through defect and service logging, step-by-step, gathering and collating all the information you need at once.
Let’s look at three big reasons why going digital with your maintenance defect logging and management is a smart idea to stop unnecessary calls and emails coming in from clients.
1 Empowered, self-sufficient clients
By empowering clients to log their defects, take photos and monitor a list of their logged issues, you’ll promote self-serve efficiency, reducing incoming calls and emails.
Clients won’t need to call or email you to keep log issues or keep informed as they can simply log into their Maintenance portal to report problems and see real-time, up-to-date status updates. Plus, you’ll avoid the need to open and check defect statuses via unwieldy spreadsheets.
“Going digital with your maintenance process helps keep your clients informed on all defects. It’s an easy place for them to log issues and warranty problems instead of calling up regularly, waiting for you to call them back, or sending an email and feeling annoyed about having to wait for a response,” explains Lizzie Mooney, Client Success Manager.
“Once a defect is logged, your client can feel comfortable it’s been received and will be attended to or serviced, because they can see it, too. It’s great tracking for builders, as well. Both you and your clients know exactly what has been closed out, and if there’s a long list, it feels reassuring for clients to know you’re on top of their issues to be resolved.”
“In the past, if clients wanted an update, they would need to call or email their builder to ask,” says Emma Lord, Client Success Manager. “It would usually be during business hours too, to try and reach the Maintenance staff member responsible for filtering through queries and issues.”
“The problem for a builder is that over time, the number of clients in the Maintenance phase to support continues to rise and rise as you build more and more homes. If there isn’t an efficient system in place, it’s easy for mistakes to be made, response times to blow out and things to slip through the cracks — negatively impacting on the client experience, (and the employee experience, too).”
2 Automate client education
Another issue builders face is not all client queries after handover are their responsibility to action.
Staff can get caught up spending time educating clients on what to do in the event of an issue that’s outside of warranty, or general homeowners’ maintenance. Constructive Maintenance can automate this process for you by guiding clients to self-serve resources.
Steph Schumer, Business Development Manager, believes utilising a digital building maintenance app is essential to reduce unnecessary calls and emails from clients about issues that are not a builder’s responsibility. “Constructive’s Maintenance wizard informs clients automatically of what does and does not constitute a builder defect and can provide supplier details for items that need to be dealt with directly by the manufacturer.”
“With Constructive Maintenance, your clients can self-serve on these queries. Better yet, your Maintenance portal can be set up to guide your client on whether an issue actually needs to be raised with their builder, or if it’s something they need to organise themselves, for instance, checking if one of their appliances is not tripping the power, or referring to an appliance manual. This will automatically filter out what actually ends up with a builder’s Maintenance staff to action,” explains Emma.
Client education is also important for communicating what is truly urgent and what can wait for a scheduled maintenance inspection.
Client Success Manager, Lisa Petts says, “When it’s your own home being completed, every detail is of the utmost importance, so of course clients are concerned about all defects. Providing an understanding to the client of the level of urgency of an issue, as well as communicating via education that some perceived defects are not considered an issue by industry standards, means the client has that knowledge upfront and can find information easily to resolve some items on their list themselves.”
3 Set expectations and deliver a better customer experience
Client Success Manager, Gemma Elliot, believes the Maintenance period is an important time for customer experience excellence. “Providing full transparency of reported defects helps clients feel valued and reassured that their concerns are being taken seriously and will be addressed in the maintenance inspection.”
Steph shares Gemma’s beliefs: “Builders are providing such a high level of customer service throughout the build process, it’s only natural that the client experience shouldn’t end once the home is handed over. Maintenance is such a big part of the home building experience, it’s imperative it’s handled with a high level of communication and clarity.”
A scheduled maintenance inspection is one thing, but what if there are urgent issues? Reactive maintenance in home building is a reality. With Constructive Maintenance, you can resolve urgent defects faster by receiving an immediate email notification when a client logs a truly urgent defect.
A digital maintenance platform lets you deliver superior customer service by sending an email straight to the right person in your Maintenance team, along with all the information they need about the defect reported directly by the client: thorough and complete details with photos will get into the right hands, faster!
“Reassurance is so important to clients. They want to know their concerns are being addressed. If it’s urgent, builders need to react immediately, and Constructive Maintenance can make sure the right person gets notified, with everything they need to take action, straight away,” advises Lisa.
“It’s about meeting expectations, whether it involves an immediate fix, or a defect being collated into a list for a later date, either way, clients don’t want to be left unanswered or wondering if that is where the service ends.”
Lizzie agrees. “Builders need to deliver on communication to clients, even during the Maintenance phase. You can make clients feel heard and confident action is being taken by providing them with a digital maintenance platform that shows them a list of their reported defects and their status.”
Ready to get started with Constructive Maintenance?
Reduce incoming emails and calls by empowering clients to log defects, service requests and warranty issues — and track progress in real-time within your secure, custom-branded Maintenance Portal. Ensure nothing slips through the gaps and clients are kept informed. Say goodbye to spreadsheets and cluttered inboxes: resolve urgent issues faster and collate other defects in a streamlined, organised list, ready for scheduled inspections.
Request a Demo of Constructive Maintenance today.
