The cellar door lock is broken. Could you replace it? – When’s the lift scheduled to be maintained? – The new tenant wants to paint the walls himself. Can you please make a note of this in the handover records? – There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask for some time: my daughter is moving to Birmingham to study; do you have apartments for rent there, too?

Anyone who works as a field representative for a housing company often has to “field” a lot of questions. In the past, visits to tenants had to be painstakingly prepared in the office before the car was packed to the gills with various files and ring binders. And even then the representative might discover that important documents had been left behind when the tenant asked unexpected questions or the neighbour was waiting on the stairs for a “spontaneous” appointment. While such situations still arise, Aareon’s digital 360° solutions enable field representatives to handle them as effectively as possible.

The 360° solution is a platform based on apps and portals that seem almost identical for both field representatives and tenants. This has several advantages: specific processes relating to repairs, for example, are important for both parties even if the field representative naturally has particular responsibilities. And since the staff are familiar with the workings of the tool, it is easier for them to help tenants use the new channels as well. So while the new mobile control centre greatly simplifies the work of field representatives, tenants receive much better customer service from an expertly structured company. Moreover, the company’s costs are reduced because it uses its resources more intelligently, and the increase in work process efficiency means that its employees have more capacity to visit tenants. The figures that Greg Johns cites speak for themselves:

A market in a state of flux
Digital solutions like these have a great deal of potential in the United Kingdom because the British market is in a state of flux. The government has adopted an efficiency agenda to expedite digitalisation. By law, housing associations are required to reduce their rents by 1% per year until 2020. This is forcing companies to be more efficient and digitalise their business processes. They are also reviewing their costs. Greg Johns gives a commonplace example: “In the UK every property has a boiler. Through the data analysis in the 360° Field Worker solution, we can find out which boilers are particularly cost effective and durable and are also the cheapest to maintain.” The management can then purchase the corresponding equipment for renovations and new properties.

Greg Johns is pretty optimistic about the future of the 360° applications. He believes that a key point in addition to the internationalisation of the product is its potential for integrating other processes and for networking partners: “The digital 360° solution can combine tasks, processes and information from a large number of sources, be they ERP systems, utilities, contractors or other external partners.” Alongside field representatives and tenants, potential users in his view are also management, back office, contractors and third-party providers. Integration into big data analyses is also conceivable, he says. If, for example, an administrator is able to predict which of the tenants might run into financial difficulties, he or she can take action at an early stage before serious problems arise for both sides.