Gravesham Borough Council

Gravesham Borough Council has its own housing stock and is a landlord to approx 7500 homes. The council has it’s own Direct Service Organisation (DSO) with a variety of skilled staff including carpenters, electricians, plumbers, general builders and multi skilled operatives. Our DSO are responsible for the upkeep of our housing stock and cover all repairs within our homes, from fixing a leaking tap to fitting new kitchens.

Our residents can report an issue with their home to the council which we will prioritise and schedule a fix for. Customers can complete a basic online form to request a repair but is not integrated with the back office system. We’ve found that customers prefer to call our contact centre to report a repair because the CSA can schedule the repair with the customer over the phone and arrange a date/time to visit the property. Customers repeatedly ask us why this can’t be done online and ask why they have to wait so long to speak to us.

There’s no way for a customer to check up on the status of their repair or change/cancel their appointment online and therefore call our contact centre.

There’s an opportunity to re-design the the housing repairs reporting and administration process to better meet user need and improve the efficiency of the service.

Our discover phase would deliver

• Analysis of the current reporting process.
• Research into the user need that a redesigned housing repair request process should meet.
• Research into how others manage housing repair requests.
• A prototype process for a digital housing repair service.
• Prototype patterns for the front end of a digital housing repair service.
• Descriptions of which type of technology would need to be used.

In summary, we would like to discover how to transform a manually administered process for requesting a housing repair, to reduce cost, improve staff efficiency and better meet user need.