The digital transformation of Thirteen Group’s housing repairs service with ROCC has saved the housing provider over £500,000 and increased its ‘first-time fixes’ to more than 98 per cent of jobs.
Thirteen decided to implement a new repairs system after suffering from problems and outages with its existing gas servicing and repairs division, opting for a more bespoke approach to repairs and maintenance by taking repairs out of its main housing management system.
The housing provider established that it needed to automate the process of passing jobs to its operatives and scheduling appointments with tenants. This was achieved by integrating ROCC’s housing repairs system with job scheduling and operative mobile working software.
Dave Ripley, executive director of customer services, Thirteen Group, said, “The transformation of our repairs process has been remarkable, with ROCC’s support really enhancing our repairs system, helping us to improve even further.”
Lesley Addison, senior data structure manager, Thirteen, added, “Delivering the project in an eight-month timescale was a fantastic achievement. Our digital transformation for repairs required collaborative working between our property services, customer services, finance and IT teams, significantly improving our offer to tenants. The ‘go-live’ was extremely smooth and operationally there was a real buzz.”
ROCC completed the first phase of the project for responsive repairs, then focused on urgent day-to-day cyclical works in the second phase. The ROCC system enabled a unified approach to responsive and programmed demands, emergencies and appointments.
ROCC’s housing repairs system delivers up-to-date information where it is needed to support operatives and customers, handling and checking jobs against customer requirements and enabling extra details to be added by the operatives and updated in real time.
The next area to be automated was Thirteen’s out-of-hours repairs service which had previously been managed on spreadsheets. The housing provider also went live with electrical periodic testing by automating its cyclical five-year programme for more than 34,000 properties, another process which had previously been done manually on spreadsheets.
As well as unifying all of Thirteen’s repairs systems, ROCC has also recently added a My Repairs tenant portal, enabling customers to self-report repairs.
Ripley said, “Expanding our systems with ROCC has really enabled us to deliver a one-stop shop for bringing in new services.”
