We’re always working towards making things better – for residents, RMCs, developers and our colleagues. So we’re thrilled to be launching a new app, Places, which will make it even easier for us to communicate with you, as residents – and for you to communicate with us.
Places has been designed to provide residents with an intuitive, easy-to-use experience. It will be a one-stop destination for all the information you need about:
Following a successful beta testing phase, the app will be rolled out per development in the coming months. It will be available in the App Store and on Google Play.
For residents, Places will be the easiest and fastest way to communicate with us – from asking a question to raising a maintenance request.
The app offers a much better experience than sending an email, which doesn’t always go to the right person. Email inboxes aren’t an efficient way of managing tasks as they’re not a ‘helpdesk’ type of system. Instead, when contacting us via Places, residents’ queries or maintenance requests will be automatically routed to the correct Encore team members and controlled via a back-end helpdesk system. That means we can take action quickly and handle the query through to completion.
Places allows residents to keep up to date with everyday news in a visual and immediate way. This is particularly important in an emergency, especially as residents can choose to enable ‘message alert’ notifications. With recent changes to laws and regulations, particularly regarding building safety, it’s important we can share relevant information and updates with residents in a simple, timely way.
Ultimately, however, Places represents much more than just an app, as our Chief Executive, Joaquim Fillola, explains:
“Releasing our bespoke app, Places, is the culmination of many years of work. That’s because it’s not just about an app. What makes Places so powerful is because it is part of an integrated technology platform – it’s not a standalone system.
This platform is also used to manage assets, maintenance and compliance. This is important because a lot of customer interaction involves residents notifying us that something requires maintenance. We wanted a system that could handle the entire process from end-to-end – in a way that is simple to use for our clients and our managers.
If you have multiple different systems with each doing its own thing, that becomes incredibly unwieldy, difficult to manage and inevitably leads to problems.
With Places, we can progress a resident-reported maintenance issue, within the same system. It can be seamlessly turned into a works order or quotation request to a contractor (while checking that there are available funds), allowing the resident to see the progress.
All of our approved contractors operate on the platform. They do everything from receive their works order, report progress and submit their invoice and inspection record on it.”
The Places app will be progressively rolled out to all property owners – and rental tenants – within each community we manage. If you’re a resident at an estate managed by Encore, look out for a communication from us in the coming months detailing more about the app, and how you can download it and log in.
This is another step as we continue to level-up how our industry approaches customer service, systems and technology. As with all things ‘tech’, we’ll continue to develop it, enhancing its features and capability.