Common Maintenance Request Challenges

For many facilities teams, maintenance requests from facility users make up a significant portion of the work week. As the primary point of interaction between the facilities teams and facility users, the maintenance request process offers the opportunity to collaborate and build strong relationships.

However, often, the maintenance request process is a source of frustration for facility teams and users alike.

In this blog, we look at some of the most common challenges with the maintenance request process, and why these emerge.

Requests are overwhelming

Facilities teams can often find themselves overwhelmed and frustrated when maintenance requests come in from multiple forms and channels. In a typical, manual maintenance request process, facilities users have multiple channels through which they can make a request to the facilities team.

They might send an email, phone through, or speak directly to a member of the facilities team. A flood of requests from all directions makes it difficult to quantify and prioritise the work. This then makes the team feel as though they’re facing a mountain of work with no clear path.

Why this happens

Bringing all requests together to a single point is important for visibility, and therefore prioritisation and resourcing. However, amalgamating all requests into a single place adds significant administration time for the facilities team.

When requests can come in from multiple channels, it can feel like a barrage for the facilities team. There’s little reprieve from the requests themselves and committing to the admin of bringing them all together can simply be too much to handle. Often, this means this crucial step is simply missed, compromising visibility over open jobs.

How to avoid request overwhelm

Streamlining the request process by limiting requests to a single channel helps to reduce request overwhelm and improve visibility. By ensuring all requests come in through the same place, requests start to feel more manageable for the team.

Facility users fail to submit requests

Managing requests can be a stressful component of the job, but it is critical that facility users can submit requests. Facilities users can be your eyes around the facility, noticing maintenance needs during the course of their day.

However, when users have to go to reception, or get to a kiosk or desktop to log into a portal to log a request, there’s a good chance they’ll forget, or otherwise neglect, to do so.

This can result in an issue gradually worsening over time, necessitating a more difficult and expensive fix down the line, or worse, someone getting injured.

Why this happens

The bigger the perceived barrier to submitting a maintenance request, the more likely facilities users will simply neglect to do so. There are plenty of distractions and other priorities that can emerge between the point at which facility users notice an issue, to the point of submission.  

How to avoid request neglect

Making sure users submit requests as soon as they are faced with an issue by reducing or removing the perceived barrier. Enable users to easily log requests from a mobile device to lessen the impact of distractions and competing priorities.

Requests are missing key details

It can be frustrating for facilities teams to receive requests that have omitted important details. Requests that simply state that a tap is broken, but don’t specify a location for example, will require follow up with the facility user, or investigation by the facilities team.

This results in wasted time for the facilities team, either engaging in back-and-forth emails, or by physically assessing the situation.

Why this happens

Maintenance requests are most often submitted via email. This means that when a facility user goes to log a request, they’re faced with a blank email. While it might be common sense to the facilities team what details they require, it’s often far less obvious for facility users, particularly if they aren’t regularly submitting requests.

How to get the right details, every time

Ensure the correct details and provided every time by providing guidance to facility users about what details to include. Rather than leaving them to their own devices, provide facility users with a template for requests.

Facility users can’t know what they don’t know, and it is unreasonable to assume they have an in-depth knowledge of maintenance processes.

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