With millions of square feet of properties under our management, we have a lot of work to organize, and a lot of people to communicate with. Even though you likely are not a tenant, I guarantee by the end of reading this, you will feel confident enough to submit a work order!
We evaluated dozens, and fully stood up (operationally tested) a handful of these, before deciding on Tikkit, developed by Gridium.
Some of our criteria included:
I think the most important of all these was SIMPLICITY. We knew that our primary hurdle would be getting tenants to accept this as a primary means of communication, and that meant it had to be as easy as picking up the phone, or rattling off an email. Tenants do not need one more login/password to remember, and do not need any hoops to jump through.
We are very proud of our homepage, ThomasDuke.com, but thought that we could do even simpler, so we started a ‘mini-brand’ of DUKE FIX. This has 2 parts, www.DukeFix.com to enter work orders, as well as 844-Duke-Fix, to get straight to a property manager, 24/7. In the past, some tenants have known that Thomas Duke Co manages the property the lease, but then when they call, they would reach the Brokerage department and be confused. This has given a separate “Front End” to Property Management.
Tenants are instructed that whenever they have an ‘issue that can be fixed’ (we do not use this portal for lease questions, accounting issues, etc) to head to DukeFix.com . From there, a single box asks for your email address. There are NO passwords, only cookies. Entering in your email has tikkit send you an email with a link, and once you click that link, the device you are on is authorized with your credentials for a month. Click the link, and you will come to a screen with the list of a 6 field we would like to know about your issue. This is as simple as writing an email, but makes sure that the tenant is providing the relevant info.
We want to know:
Once the info is filled out, it is immediately broadcast to EVERYONE on our staff who is involved with that property. If a Low priority flag, it is posted to the slack channel for the property, and will be assigned. If higher, or critical priority, emailed directly to property managers, and even texted to phones as well.
From here, we take over! Likely a building engineer will ‘grab’ the tikkit from the queue, and let the tenant know when we will be handling this (we aim for <24hrs for most fixes).
Once an engineer is working on it, we ALWAYS include pictures of the issue, and pictures of the fix! This helps our office see how the engineers are handling things, and also gives an important audit trail. If issues ever pop up again, we can go back and see what was done last time, and how we can handle it differently
With all of our work going through this platform, we are able to look at things from a bird’s eye view, and see where issues more than they should. We can see one property here has significantly more janitorial issues than others, even after the quantity of tikkits is weighted against it’s size.
Systems like this help us be more responsive, more organized, and therefore more competitive. We want to fix things right the first time, and have no problem being completely transparent with how we do it!
If you have any further questions on our systems, considerations for implementing this at a property, or simply want to connect, please reach out to Trevor@thomasduke.com
