Tracking and managing warranty defects with spreadsheets and emails requires a significant investment of time and energy, plus a dedication to staying organised and on top of communications. With large volumes of builds entering the Maintenance phase, it can often be a frustrating time for clients who are waiting for answers or when communications may unintentionally fall through the cracks.
Let’s dive into everything you need to know about choosing the best defect logging software so your Maintenance team members and clients sitting in their warranty period can both have an excellent experience.
What is Online Maintenance software?
The term “Online Maintenance software” refers to a digital platform, like Constructive Maintenance, that empowers your clients to log defects, service requests and warranty issues themselves anytime and track progress in real-time within a custom-branded, secure online Portal.
Residential builders can use an Online Maintenance System to boost their customer experience in these ways:
- Swiftly administer defects via a streamlined and organised list
- Ensure nothing slips through the gaps
- Collect from clients all the defect information at once
- Keep clients informed via automation
Here’s what you should look for when choosing software to manage the maintenance phase of your clients’ building journeys:
Secure, online and available 24/7
Web-based warranty and defect software should be accessible from anywhere and lodging a defect shouldn’t be reliant on office hours or staff availability.
Your Maintenance platform should securely host your clients’ details, defects and warranty information online so it’s reliably available anytime.
This means both your Maintenance team and your clients will have access to the same centralised data so you can effortlessly achieve transparency and seamless collaboration.
Easy implementation
It’s important to make sure you don’t need to personally run or update the software to use, or maintain, its features. Buying hardware, organising licensing and installation can be expensive and time consuming.
With Constructive Maintenance, everything is cloud-based and requires no installation or ongoing technical maintenance from your team. Your dedicated Client Success Manager will guide you through a simple implementation process so you can be up and running quickly and efficiently.
Cost-effectiveness and cashflow efficiency
A standout benefit of a web-based warranty and defect system like Constructive is cost-effectiveness. Paying per job means you only pay for what you use, when you need it.
Scalability
Ideally, you want a Maintenance system that can accommodate your growth and smoothly scale to make sure each and every client receives a high level of customer service.
While you can set up Excel to track clients’ defects, inspection dates and trade allocations alongside email, a spreadsheet is limited by its capabilities and can quickly become unmanageable and messages can get lost or become hard to track. Customer experience can unnecessarily suffer by forgotten clients and queries, missed communications and lack of transparency.
Constructive Maintenance has been designed specifically for home builders with scalability and customer experience in mind. No matter how large your list of jobs in maintenance becomes, you’ll have the features to accommodate your business’s needs and keep clients informed — and happy!
Self-serve for clients
Clients now expect a digital platform where they can self-serve warranty information in context of their problem, as well as log issues and defects as they come across them.
Constructive Maintenance guides clients through an intuitive and simple-to-use wizard — customised with your branding, preferred wording and preferences — to ensure you receive all the information you need about an issue in one place.
With digital self-service, your staff aren’t wasting time chasing up photos, specifics or continually explaining to clients why some issues aren’t your responsibility to fix. And your clients aren’t frustrated waiting for emails and calls to be returned. They can see exactly what will be addressed at their maintenance inspection, understand what’s happening with urgent defects at a glance and be displayed manuals and relevant manufacturer links exactly when they need them.
Assign trades, filter by status and generate reports
When organising for defects to be resolved, you need software that will allow you to build in a custom database of your trade contacts.
Your team needs to be able to quickly make allocation decisions: Who is going to resolve each defect? There should be built-in flexibility to decide whether to show these details to your customer.
Working with many clients at once means filtering by trade is a must-have feature for a Maintenance Supervisor or Coordinator, as is the ability to generate customised, individual reports to aggregate defects into organised, printable lists of outstanding, completed or rejected issues.
Provide an excellent customer experience all the way through the building journey. Streamline your Maintenance phase with online warranty software: exceed client expectations and reduce the amount of time your team spends on communication.
Ready to get started?
Request your Constructive Maintenance Demo today.
