Work Order Communication

 Let's think about the process of a work order. Our residents let us know what needs to be worked on in their home. Now, different properties have different processes for doing that. In some cases, it's over the phone. Sometimes it's through a resident portal, email, text message, or maybe even you've been caught in the parking lot and somebody yells at you, Hey, my toilet's clogged.

Whatever the process is at your community, it has resulted in either a piece of paper or a notification in your app to say work is required. In other words, our residents communicated with us something specific that they're expecting to occur. We need to follow through on our part. When you go to the resident's apartment and you knock and you gain entry into the residence apartment, whether they're there or not, we need to communicate with our resident what we either are going to do if they're there or what we did if they weren't there.

The reason why we need to communicate what they did, if they weren't there is. That way they know that we responded. Now within your app, you can actually let them know, but do yourself a favor. Do it with details. Now, I'm not saying you need to write an entire novel. Something along the lines that, uh, you know, I went to the shop and went on the third shelf down, fourth bin over, and I pulled two parts out.

I evaluated one and saw that it wasn't gonna fit the, for the. Thing that I needed to fix right now. So I put it back, I grabbed the other one with my left hand, and then in my right hand I grabbed my screwdriver, which is what I was gonna need. You don't need to go into that level of detail, but we do need to go into enough detail to where our residents have the confidence that we're going to complete what we needed to do, or that we did complete what we needed to do.

Oh, by the way, it's a great idea when you write your note for it to be legible. If you are writing, handwriting and using a pen or pencil, if you're using your app, be sure that you write incomplete sentences, use punctuation, and do more than just the word done. Oh, completed, repaired, adjusted words that are synonyms of that.

In other words, words that are so vague that our resident has no idea what it was that you meant. Those are almost useless. All they do is they, they said somebody responded, but they don't give our resident the confidence that we repaired. But it was, they were asking us to take care of. By the way, put the little, what I like to call the chef's kiss on your work order.

In other words, always add the words at the end. Thank you. We're not saying thank you for breaking something, or Thank you for wearing something out. Actually, what we're saying is thank you for letting me into your home to solve what your problem was. I.