South Lakes Housing Association is using M3 Housing’s M3Central Diagnostics to enable more accurate diagnoses of its tenants’ repairs requests.
In 2014, South Lakes formed a customer services team (CST) as the first point of contact for all repair enquiries. At first, the largely non-technical CST staff had difficulty accurately diagnosing repairs. South Lakes also decided to move away from a bespoke schedule of rates for repair items to the M3NHF Schedule of Rates to improve job costing. However, the housing provider was concerned that its CST staff would struggle to transition to the new schedule so it wanted a diagnostics tool to ensure an accurate diagnosis of repairs during the initial contact with a tenant.
South Lakes wanted a system that would give its CST the ability to quickly connect the requested repair to the correct schedule of rates item while on the phone with a tenant. At the same time, it decided to implement a new housing management system, Civica Cx.
South Lakes chose M3 Housing’s M3Central Diagnostics, having had experience of the M3 suite of products from its adoption of the M3Pamwin Plus appraisal and development tool. M3Central Diagnostics provided integration with Civica Cx, and provided the functionality to configure and make real-time changes to the system without having to log support calls.
Testing of M3Central Diagnostics was tied with South Lakes’ broader implementation of Civica Cx. Implementation of the housing management system took 19 months, and the decision was made to use M3Central from day one of the system going live.
CST staff can now directly launch M3Central Diagnostics from within Civica Cx, and run through a series of graphics while on the phone with a resident to diagnose the repair. Staff can also adjust selected items and quantities before passing the repair back to Civica Cx, which then schedules the appointment using the DRS scheduling system.
