The maintenance request form, done properly

A maintenance request form should ask four things: where, what, how bad, and how to reach you. Every question beyond those four reduces the number of problems you find out about, and finding out is the entire point of the form.

The four questions

• •Where: pre-filled if they scanned a code, otherwise a building and a room in plain words
• •What: one free text box and a photograph, in their words, not from a list
• •How bad: three options at most, written as consequences rather than as labels
• •Who to tell when it is done: a name and one way to reach them

Do not make them choose a category

A teacher does not know whether a wet patch on the ceiling is plumbing, roofing or HVAC, and asking them to guess produces a wrong answer that then routes the job to the wrong person. Take the free text and the photograph, and let somebody who knows do the categorising in five seconds.

Do not require an account

A login is the largest single filter on whether a fault gets reported at all. A code on the wall that opens a form with the location already filled in is the version people actually use. If you need to know who reported it, ask for a name in the form rather than for a password.

Reply twice

Once when the request is received, so they know it landed, and once when it is done. The first message removes most of the chasing. The second removes most of the duplicates. Both should be automatic, because nobody has time to send them by hand and so nobody ever does.

Say what happens next, in the confirmation

Not a reference number on its own. Tell them the actual next step and a rough timescale for the priority they chose. "Someone will look at this today" ends the phone call that would otherwise arrive at four o’clock.

The one number to watch

Requests with no first response, and how long they have been waiting. That is the number a tenant experiences. Time to complete matters, but nobody is angry about a job that takes a week if somebody told them on the first day.