Elevating Maintenance with AppWork's New Program

[Paul Rhodes] (0:01 - 0:37) Hey there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Maintenance Mindset. I'm Paul Rhoades, and today is an episode for leaders.

Leaders trying to solve maintenance problems at the technician, at the property, and even at the industry level. So, after a word from our sponsor... Well, wait a second.

I don't need to go to our sponsor because they're already here. Let me introduce everybody to Dani Black, who's the Chief Revenue Officer for AppWork. Welcome, Dani.

[Dani Black] (0:38 - 0:44) Thanks, Paul. I'm excited to be here. It's nice to get to discuss these topics with you, for sure.

[Paul Rhodes] (0:45 - 1:02) Oh, I think it's so cool, and it's an exciting thing because what is happening? What's going on at AppWork that solves issues, that gets beyond just maybe a product, but this is actually solving things, solving issues.

[Dani Black] (1:03 - 3:03) Yeah, I hope that we're doing a lot of that in a lot of aspects at AppWork, and I'm confident that we are. But I am really excited to announce a new initiative that we have just launched actually today at AppWork, which is our AppWork Top Maintenance Rating Program. And the program is really designed to recognize top properties that achieve excellence based on ratings and reviews from residents directly, specifically on maintenance.

We designed this program a little bit in conjunction with some of the gamification and aspects that we already have within the AppWork program for technicians. And we've gotten such great feedback from the technician gamification and the recognition that we're able to provide at the individual technician level that we wanted to understand and see how we could move that to more of a team aspect and recognizing properties as a whole. So we developed the Top Maintenance Rating Program in order to recognize the top 25 properties who receive the highest percentage of four- and five-star reviews from residents across all of AppWork.

So across any property management company that is working with AppWork, we are able to aggregate all of the ratings data and rank them on a quarterly basis. So every summer, fall, winter, spring, we're releasing a list of the top 25 properties that have excelled with maintenance and helping to provide them with some marketing resources as well as an actual physical trophy that they can set up in their office and show off to prospective renters. And most importantly, they can use to understand where their properties are that they have the most excelling maintenance teams and maintenance staff so they can provide the proper recognition for them.

[Paul Rhodes] (3:03 - 4:05) Okay, so there's a lot there. There is a lot there. There's a lot there that is really, really cool.

I think the first place to really start talking about that is you've got an awards program that is not siloed or internal to one management company. So in other words, if I'm management company A and I have 250 properties, then it's a common thing to where you determine the performance or you rank performance of your properties on an internal set of standards and KPIs or whatever business paradigm. But what you're saying is that you're taking properties at company A at the property level and putting them with properties at company Q, company P, company Z, company D, company F, and you're pulling 25 out of it?

[Dani Black] (4:06 - 4:18) Yes. So we are allowing for you to understand exactly where you fall within benchmarks compared to competitors that are also on app work.

[Paul Rhodes] (4:18 - 4:39) And those are benchmarks that are, if I remember the last conversation I had with one of your customers, Michelle Wood, was trade-specific to where it was like performing in plumbing, performing in air conditioning, various electrical repairs or that, right?

[Dani Black] (4:39 - 7:05) So it's specific at the technician level. So app work provides a badge and recognition and rating system that we created for technicians within our system. So technicians at that level, anytime they complete a work order, that work order is marked as completed and then an email is sent to residents and residents are prompted to leave a review for that technician.

Those reviews are then aggregated and we take the data from the reviews and we understand where those reviews come from, whether it be on plumbing or HVAC or appliance issues, and we can see how the technician rates overall. We can also understand in terms of their skill set where they're falling for training purposes and where they might need additional training there. What app work has done with the top maintenance rating program is actually taken the data and the aggregate, not just on one type of skill level, but looking at the overall ratings for the property for all of the team members and all of the ratings that they are receiving for their maintenance.

And we are looking at those, ranking them in order across our platform, across every single property in our platform and coming up with the list of the top 25 properties that are excelling in that. So while we are very dedicated and have spent a lot of time and focus on gamifying and making sure that technicians at an individual level are receiving the recognition and the training and the support that they need and deserve, we wanted to take that to the next level and take it to the property level so that we're creating some friendly competition among our clients and among other management companies.

But also, it gives the maintenance teams at properties an individual, like a singular goal to strive for as a team, and that can help push things even further. So it's not just about competition with other management companies, but it's about competition internally and also creating an environment of teamwork for the maintenance technicians.

[Paul Rhodes] (7:06 - 9:36) You know, it really strikes me because traveling across the country, most, well, the number, and I've talked about it on the show before, the number one question I've been asked is, how long should it take for a maintenance technician to do XYZ? And they'll ask me, and I'll think back to my history, and it's like, well, wait a second. If we're talking about replacing an outlet, for instance, for me to replace an outlet on a standard setting in a property that the outlet was installed correctly and it's a newer-ish type property, maybe a half hour, 45 minutes start to finish door-to-door.

Except there was that one property that I worked at that it was an eight-and-a-half-hour job because when the receptacle was installed, they pulled the wire tight and then stapled it in the wall to the stud, which meant in order to replace it, you had to cut a hole in the drywall, cut the wire, splice a new wire in, make it come out the original box, and then fix the drywall hole that you made. So my answer, if they're asking me to that, is you've got to talk with the technician. But what strikes me about the evaluation system that you're talking about here is you're getting past that because not only are we looking at time and not only are we looking at completion, but you're adding that middle section in there of a resident view of what happened.

So in the case of my outlet story, the resident's going to see that I had to cut a hole in the wall and do all of this extra work, and when I got finished, it was done and it worked and I didn't have to come back for it. So what I think is unique there is adding that extra component to the information that you're gathering and giving me the ability for my work to be compared to another guy at the same property. And then if I'm understanding right, you're standardizing that across the board, not only within my management company, but within the whole industry.

[Dani Black] (9:37 - 10:36) Yeah, yeah, exactly. App work, and interestingly enough, I feel like when you start to talk about rating people, people get a little scared. They're like, what, you're rating me now?

I don't want a star rating applied to me. I mean, I know if you've ever, I used to do this with my friends. I don't know if you had, but on Uber or Lyft, you can go in and you can look at what your rating is from your driver.

So I know I do that, and we would compare it against each other with our friends, and it would be really embarrassing if you had a lower rating. Well, the nice thing is, one, technicians are doing that within app work. They're comparing themselves to each other, and it's spurring friendly competition and improving the quality of work that we're seeing out of technicians.

But overall, it's actually a really good thing. The average rating for technicians across all of app work is a 4.2 star. That's really good, 4.2 stars.

[Paul Rhodes] (10:37 - 10:42) I was going to say, but that's 4.2 out of 5 or out of 500?

[Dani Black] (10:42 - 10:44) Out of 5 stars, yes.

[Paul Rhodes] (10:44 - 10:47) 4.2 out of 5 stars. I think it's really, really good.

[Dani Black] (10:47 - 10:50) That's really good. That's probably better than my Uber rating.

[Paul Rhodes] (10:52 - 10:57) We're not going to talk about that. No, no. Keep right on rolling.

Okay.

[Dani Black] (11:00 - 12:32) So those 4.2 stars, that's really positive because we also know in the industry, and this is kind of one of the issues that we see across the industry for maintenance, is that any reviews for properties in general, there's three topics, three top topics that people review the property on. It's staff, parking, and maintenance. And maintenance is the one area that tends to skew very heavily negative for reviews.

And what we're seeing in app work is that that's just not the case as it pertains to an individual technician if they're getting consistently rated on their work orders. And so we want to highlight the properties that are excelling in those ratings. And at the same time, within app work, we've actually built it out so that when a resident rates that technician or is giving a rating and a review for that work order completion, they can actually post that to the review site for the property.

So whether that be your Google page for the property or an apartment ratings page or apartments.com, the review site of their choice, they can have that resident post. And it's just a click of a button after they've already rated the technician. And they just have to do almost no work.

And the property is now going to get some really beneficial, positive reviews on that property.

[Paul Rhodes] (12:33 - 15:05) So wait a second, you're telling me that there is a way now that if I plunge a toilet really, really well, and I do a good job, it ends up making a positive impact on a review website somewhere. And we all know that if it's on the internet, it's accurate. So it's there forever.

It's there. That's a good point. Yes, it's there.

The other thing that I find interesting about what you're saying, and you're right, all the rideshare apps, you can get a rating as a passenger, you can rate your driver and those. I agree, I've had some funny conversations with people who've had better ratings, and some have had worse ratings than me. But actually, the part that I'm intrigued by, if I take off my maintenance technician hat, and I put on my learning and development hat, my employee development hat, it strikes me that these ratings also give us an opportunity to identify places where we can improve.

In other words, if I've got a maintenance technician that has a low scoring in air conditioning repairs, then I have now, not in an effort to make that employee feel less than, or they're doing a bad job. What we've actually done by having an independent third-party review, getting the resident involved in this process, we've provided an opportunity for someone like myself to take this technician aside, and we've identified it down to the technician level that we can specifically provide resources to develop and help to encourage and understand that, hey, we need some mentoring opportunities here. So it's both on the plus side, the positive review, and changing that viewpoint of maintenance.

At the same time, we are surgically helping to do that at an individual level.

[Dani Black] (15:06 - 17:17) Exactly, that's exactly right. So we also, in addition to the rating side, we also track something called callbacks, which would be when that resident gets that email and they're asked to rate, if the issue that they submitted the original work order for was not completed at all or it's still not fixed, they can actually call that work order back and they can reopen the original work order. And we track that very specifically on an individual skills basis as well so that you can very easily go into a technician's profile with an app work and see exactly how many callbacks they've had in certain areas.

And to your point, give them specific training in the areas that they need training in. Not everyone's going to need HVAC training versus plumbing training. Some people are going to have the varying skill sets.

Most people will probably have the varying skill sets. I'm not confident with either of those things, but I'm good with electrical. So it's up to the individual skill set.

And that's such a hard thing to understand and find out if you're not following them around every single day, looking at the work that they do. Outside of those initial onboarding days of training the technician, there's not that much oversight on the day-to-day work and not that much data, I should say. Not necessarily oversight, but data on whether or not those issues that they're fixing are being fixed correctly and appropriately and not getting called back multiple times or not having multiple work orders reopened.

And so there's this real huge gap of being able to understand where the training needs to happen for individuals. Whether that be a good indicator of needing customer service training also is like an overall. You're getting bad ratings overall.

But then there's the individual bad ratings of certain types of work orders that can be true.

[Paul Rhodes] (17:17 - 19:21) That is, I think, at just an essential level, a fundamental level, that one piece of the equation is an important piece that is missing for a lot of management companies. And I think back to I worked for a company. We took over a property, and when we took over the property, the maintenance supervisor who was there before I got there was a guy by the name of Pete.

And a resident called in an air conditioning work order, and I go show up, and I knock on the door, and this wonderful lady answers the door, and I'm standing there with an air conditioning filter. And she looks at me and looks past me and then looks around me and looks back and says, Where's Pete? And I explain, Pete's not here.

I'm here to fix your air conditioner. Can I take a look? And she says, Not with that, Sonny.

What do you mean with that? Well, when Pete came, he showed up with a green jug, and he had these plumbing gauge things that he always had, and in 15 minutes he was done. And I asked her, How often had Pete been here?

And she says, Oh, he came every Thursday. And as it turns out, what Pete was doing at that property was every Thursday, and there was other things that were involved. It wasn't just this apartment.

What Pete was doing every Thursday was, in essence, applying a Band-Aid to the original problem, and then the next Thursday he'd come back, reapply a new Band-Aid to the problem, but he never solved the problem. I get there, and I let her know, I believe my job is a maintenance technician. I'm like a doctor.

If you get to know me too well, then I'm not doing my job.

[Dani Black] (19:23 - 19:25) I love that analogy.

[Paul Rhodes] (19:28 - 20:12) So I was there for three and a half hours, but I found it was a refrigerant leak. I fixed the problem, solved it, got it fixed. And then she was mad at me because I took too long.

I interrupted her normal prescribed day, but when I was finished, I said, You won't have to call me again for the air conditioning. And it played out correctly. Now, this is back when we were doing work orders on stone tablets and chisels.

I mean, this was in the days of carbon paper and dot matrix printing, where we were only tracking work orders completed.

[Dani Black] (20:12 - 20:16) You might have to explain carbon paper for the kids out there.

[Paul Rhodes] (20:17 - 20:53) Oh, yeah. Carbon paper was this really, really cool thing. Back even before floppy disks, I know that's another one too, where you'd write on the top page, and it would go all the way through multiple layers of paper.

So that's carbon paper. But in that community, we were only tracking completion. You know, 10 work orders came in, I did 10 work orders.

Yay, I did my job. Doesn't matter whether people are happy or angry with how I did it, or even how long it took me to do it.

[Dani Black] (20:53 - 21:01) Or how many times you had to visit that apartment multiple times over and over again to fix the issue or fix the issue.

[Paul Rhodes] (21:01 - 21:44) And not only that, identifying the fact that with that information and paying attention to that information, Pete could have received training to do the very first time he went to that wonderful lady's apartment, he could have fixed her air conditioner in the three and a half hours that I did. Not to mention the fact that there was a huge expense in the refrigerant that was continually being added to that unit.

[Dani Black] (21:45 - 22:09) At the expense of Pete's time, right? So Pete takes, that takes so much more time in the long run if he's having to go there every Thursday for 15, 20 minutes to do this fix, over time that adds up to way more than three hours and that's other work orders that can't be completed and other crucial issues that might need to be fixed that aren't getting addressed.

[Paul Rhodes] (22:09 - 22:33) So we're taking then good, friendly competition and using that because of a top 25 list or best technician or I believe, if I remember right, what was said before is the guru label that gets applied.

[Dani Black] (22:34 - 22:39) We're taking that. The badge for guru, yeah.

[Paul Rhodes] (22:39 - 22:50) Yeah, and providing good service to our residents which I've got to believe that translates into other data points as well, doesn't it?

[Dani Black] (22:51 - 24:52) Yeah, absolutely. So there are a lot of things that we look at across maintenance technicians in general too. We have a whole badge system, a whole gamification system for individual technicians and they can earn badges for some of the things that you were looking at.

So total completion of work orders but also things like the ratings that they're receiving, the time that it takes to complete the work orders, total completion times and various other filters and app work comes standard with a lot of badges built in and we found that gamification of the maintenance technicians has really improved efficiency, it's improved teamwork and camaraderie and not to continue to bring it back to the new initiative but that's what we really wanted to focus on with the Top Maintenance Rating Program for properties and so mirroring that badge, the badge gamification that we've built out for the individual technicians, we actually built out a similar functionality for the Top Maintenance Rating Program for properties which is they'll receive a digital badge that they can actually utilize on marketing materials, they can post that on their ILS, they can put it on their review sites and their photo carousels and then in addition to that, they're actually going to get a crystal trophy that's going to be mailed to them and they can actually have a physical trophy in their office to display and so I know that's got off topic from your data points a little bit but it relates back, we're trying to tie everything together so that the teams are really working to earn that trophy and in order to do that, you need to have the data behind it to train them and so that they can achieve those goals as a team because you can't just rely on one individual to achieve those goals.

[Paul Rhodes] (24:53 - 25:02) So my question then, if I win the trophy, if I have the trophy, do I have to give it to another property next quarter to somebody else next quarter?

[Dani Black] (25:03 - 25:05) No. No, you get it. You get another one at the end.

[Paul Rhodes] (25:07 - 25:17) It's not like a standing up. When I get to be next quarter, when I get to be number four, I don't have to send the number 10 to somebody else and wait on somebody to send me the number 10, right?

[Dani Black] (25:17 - 25:30) No, it's not. It's not the Stanley Cup. It's not the Lombardi Trophy.

It's where you get to keep it. It's yours forever. You just get more of them.

So if you win multiple times, you just get another one.

[Paul Rhodes] (25:31 - 25:40) We've just identified the next step of the awards program. You have the Apple Cup. The huge cup with the white gloves that carry everywhere across the country.

[Dani Black] (25:40 - 25:47) I think the team at Appwork will be very interested in actually pursuing that. So I'm sure that that will happen.

[Paul Rhodes] (25:49 - 26:40) From a data standpoint, I've got to believe then that having a friendly competition program, especially structured this way, a management company, not only are they developing their technicians in the technician skill level, but by nature of the fact that you are not only identifying where improvement is able, where there's room for improvement, you can surgically provide that improvement at the individual technician, that foundational level, and then you get exponential benefits because that incorporates to a team and those improved skill levels, then I've got to believe it increases renewal rates.

[Dani Black] (26:41 - 27:47) Absolutely. It improves reputation on the property level because the reviews pour back over. It significantly improves your resident experience.

There's been a big focus in the industry for resident experience over the last number of years. And all of those surveys are getting feedback many days, many weeks, months after the fact that these things happen. These ratings and reviews are being delivered in the moment at the time that the service is actually happening.

So it's more immediate real-time feedback for teams. And it's also understanding exactly how the residents are feeling in that moment. So if you can capture that in as close to the time that these things are taking place as possible, you're getting much better data on the resident side of things and how they're feeling.

And as well as that data on how and when to train your teams to improve the resident experience as well.

[Paul Rhodes] (27:47 - 28:41) And I'm going to take it one step further. Yes, the resident experience and all of that that we're doing for the people. But another benefit of something like this is the physical building, the structure itself.

Because the more times I go back to re-repair something, the more opportunity there is for failure of the physical asset itself. Not only that, but if somebody has an outside identification of a skill that I lack and they provide it to me, that means every other work order I go to in the realm of electricity gets fixed faster, which increases the resident's experience. But from a building standpoint, it's fixed more accurately, which leads to the longevity of the building.

[Dani Black] (28:41 - 28:43) And saves you time and money.

[Paul Rhodes] (28:44 - 28:44) Yeah.

[Dani Black] (28:46 - 29:32) Absolutely. So interestingly that you bring that up and kind of unrelated to the training and recognition side of things, of app work, but we also build in heat maps of properties. And we have a really interesting partnership coming up with Ingrane that we are releasing heat maps based on actual overlays of the property so that you can see the individual units that have the most work orders and the history of the work orders on an individual unit level within a map of the property.

So when your technician goes to a unit, they can actually look and see this unit has had 30 work orders that are the AC repair, potentially.

[Paul Rhodes] (29:32 - 29:33) Wow.

[Dani Black] (29:33 - 29:42) You can see that history and you can understand, oh, this might be a larger issue. We might need to call in a specialist or we may need to spend some more time thinking through a repair here.

[Paul Rhodes] (29:44 - 29:46) Oh, wow. Okay, okay.

[Dani Black] (29:47 - 29:49) I'll have to do buried weed on that one, Paul.

[Paul Rhodes] (29:50 - 30:37) We're going to have to put a pin in that exact one until maybe I need to have you back and we talk about that and other things. But before we go today, I like to ask the one final question that I ask everybody and then we can say whatever else needs to be said. But my question for you is, Danny, in your career, what mindset, and this is off the cuff, so this is not, I didn't prep you for this.

What is the mindset that has led to your success?

[Dani Black] (30:39 - 30:40) Constant learning.

[Paul Rhodes] (30:41 - 30:42) Ooh.

[Dani Black] (30:42 - 31:35) I am a huge advocate of knowledge seeking and I always want to learn new things and I always want to stay on top of the newest technology and I always want to understand how those things work. I want to learn to improve myself in what I do. So I'd say knowledge seeking, constant learning has been a continuous mindset that I've used to get to the point where I'm at in my career.

That and looking for efficiencies would be the two big ones. Can I do this faster and easier? How do I make myself do this, take less time to do this thing?

Those are the two things I would say. And the learning, the constant learning feeds into the efficiency because I can learn how to be more efficient.

[Paul Rhodes] (31:35 - 31:54) Outside of apartment maintenance, you know, it strikes me if there was only a way that you and your efficiency-izing could be ranked to be the top 25 across the board of all CROs in the country, that would be you and that would be a great thing.

[Dani Black] (31:55 - 32:01) I don't know about that, but I think it's a valiant goal to strive for.

[Paul Rhodes] (32:02 - 32:43) That's awesome. Well, Dani, I would like to thank you for spending time with me today and talking through not only this really cool program and the really cool ratings and industry-wide, but also how friendly competition could be used to solve problems and solve issues and how it could even be used to identify the need for development. And thank you for sharing at the end the unprepared moment of what might have led to you.

Thank you today for coming. I appreciate it.

[Dani Black] (32:43 - 32:54) Yeah, thank you for having me. We are always excited to support you, Paul, and Maintenance Mindset, and we appreciate the time.

[Paul Rhodes] (32:55 - 33:16) Yeah, thank you very much. So, everyone, this has been the Maintenance Mindset. Please head over to appwork.com and check out what they have to offer. It's got some really cool things that you've heard us discuss today. Thanks again, and I'll see you somewhere.