February 2023: Vendor staff triaging, bulk ticket creation & more!

This month, we’re excited to introduce many new improvements to your maintenance workflow!  These new updates empower you to improve communication with your vendors and gain more insight into the work your vendor assignees are doing.   

Work Orders & Vendor Workflow Enhancements

1) More granular vendor assignments & communication

Our clients love the ease of assigning work orders and automatically sending email notifications to vendors.  This release takes your vendor assignment and communication to the next level!  Now, you can manage individual vendor staff information and enable them to receive communications.  Here are some ways you can utilize this new feature:

• Manage vendor staff in different departments – You can add multiple staff members and allow them to be assigned tickets. This enables you to communicate more easily with an employee from the accounting department, a triage person, the owner of the vendor company, etc.  
• Set a specific vendor staff as a default assignee – This person will automatically be selected as a default assignee from a vendor company to prevent confusion or avoid assigning a work order to the wrong person.  

You can also set a vendor staff member’s preferred contact method in the vendor management database so you know how they want to hear from you. You can add their SMS, mobile, home, or work phone number and set their primary contact method.

2) New vendor reply tracking

In December 2022, we introduced a new feature enabling you to track resident replies to your emails in the Message Center.  Similarly, a history of all your email communications with assignees including vendors will be now stored automatically in Pilera too.  You can see a history of all conversations, when the vendors replied, and their attachments within the Message Center.  To see the replies, filter on Work Orders in the Message Center.  The “replied” indicator shows you which messages have responses from vendors.

3) Invalid vendor contact information

We now also tell you in the app if a vendor staff member cannot receive communications because their email address is invalid.

4) Gain insights into work done by vendor staff members

It’s now easier to know what staff members of a particular vendor are working on.  You can now filter the dashboard by a specific vendor staff member so you can see all the work orders they’re working on, along with priority, due dates, and more.  Furthermore, you can take this data offline with custom PDF and Excel reports.

5) Create tickets in bulk

Power through your work faster and save time by creating tickets in bulk! We have two new options to help you achieve greater efficiency:

1. Duplicate a ticket – If you have similar tickets that you need to create at once, this new enhancement can speed up the process.  When duplicating a ticket, our system automatically populates the description, assignee, and other ticket settings which you can adjust if needed.  For example, you can leverage this new feature to create tickets that are all assigned to the same person or create the same type of tickets that needs to be assigned to different people.
2. Save and create another ticket – Through this option, you can create a new ticket after you finish creating the current ticket.  That way, you can continue creating new tickets without having to leave the page.

Communication

Resident Email Replies

Email messages which have resident replies now display at the top of the specific message details.

---

---

About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier property management software that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel improve customer service. Request a personalized demo so you can learn how Pilera’s community management suite can increase work efficiency for your company.