A major housing provider was concerned that one of its contractors, specialising in ‘out of hours’ emergency cover, was receiving low satisfaction levels. However the contractor argued that this because customers were expecting them to finish the job, whereas their remit was only to ‘make safe’ and a second contractor would finish the job in normal working hours.

Insightcube used operational data from 100,000 maintenance jobs , combined with customer satisfaction and complaint data to work out what was really going on. We concluded that this contractor was providing a worse level of customer service than should be expected. We also concluded that it was more effective to have a single contractor cover both the out of hours work and the normal hours work: the total job completion time was shorter and the customer satisfaction level higher.