Want to get three stars for your repair service? Listen to your tenants, says Ian Marlow
Listen to your tenants and then act quickly on what they say if you want to build a three-star repairs and maintenance service. In 1990, Leicester council’s repairs and maintenance service was at rock bottom. We faced a clear choice – make some radical changes or go under. We chose the first option and, in doing so, learned some valuable lessons.

Consult your tenants
The first thing is to ask tenants what they want. Go to tenants’ meetings, do surveys, talk to individuals, review official complaints, get opinions from councillors and MPs about the issues raised, re-read tenants’ letters and study articles in your local paper. Delivering repairs within a time limit is vital, but what’s more important to tenants is knowing that someone will turn up on a specific day – people don’t want to be waiting at home day after day just in case someone turns up. They want to know which day someone will come, and for them to turn up on that day and do the job.

Introduce an appointment system
With that in mind, you need to set up an appointment system, so you can be specific about when the work will be done. Then you will be able to plan your service and handle non-emergency repairs far more effectively and improve customer satisfaction.

The way forward is to bring the front-line people, who carry out the repairs, together with the work planners, who will match the jobs to the operatives, and the IT people who will devise the computer programs. This way you avoid ending up with a neat system on paper that doesn’t work in practice.

You don’t have to have a computerised system, a paper-based set-up can be as effective. But make sure everyone involved is working together and liaising with each other. We went for a computerised system, even though it took longer and cost more to set up, because we had such a large volume of work to handle.

Start small
Once you’ve got it working, try the system out in a small pilot area in a low-key way. When you’re sure it’s working well, roll it out across your whole area and develop it.

When we set up our scheme we only handled morning and afternoon appointments for internal repairs. But once we’d experienced the benefits of a planned system, we included evening and external work, and now all of our day-to-day repairs are handled on an appointment basis.

Push ahead
Introducing any change in local government can be heavy going, but this one is worth the effort. If you push ahead, you can get it done in a short time. In Leicester, we started development in April 1991. It took six months to get the computer system working. The pilot scheme was approved in August and launched in September, for a four-month trial.

The pilot proved successful, so we rolled repairs by appointment out across the whole city over the following six months.

Long-term benefits
Offering repairs by appointment means you can provide a more reliable service at less cost, without a repairs backlog and fewer cancellations. You may find demand rises, but we found that so did our productivity (and the repair team bonuses).

If you don’t send someone to inspect the job in advance, some of the larger repairs may need two appointments, but on the other hand if you also have a multi-skilled workforce, other repairs may only need one visit instead of the usual five.

We have also found that customer satisfaction has improved. This has led to further constructive consultation, which in turn has resulted in other improvements and new services for tenants. So if you’re serious about improving your service, be prepared for a lot of hard work.