Ask a repairs team where the day goes and very few will say “repairs”. They will say the phone. The resident ringing to ask when. The resident ringing because nobody came. The complaint that started life as a reasonable question. The colleague chasing on behalf of a councillor. The actual work is often the smaller half of the job.

Volume is at a record. UK housing associations spent around £10bn on repairs and maintenance in 2024-25, up 13% on the year before, and Housemark put responsive repairs at a median of 320.3 per 1,000 homes in early 2026. Every one of those jobs is a potential source of contact, and often several. Repairs and property condition dominate complaints across the sector, and the pressure lands first on contact centres and customer-facing staff who mostly cannot answer the question being asked. They can see that a job exists. They frequently cannot see where it is, who holds it, or why it stalled. So they promise a call back, and the chase starts over.

The cheapest contact is the one that never needed to happen. That means two things. First, residents need to know what is happening without asking, which requires somebody knowing in the first place. Second, when they do ask, whoever answers should be able to see the whole job in one place: what was reported, what evidence came with it, what was decided, and what happens next. The difference between a forty second call and a four minute one is almost entirely how many systems the person answering has to open.

Alix keeps the whole job in one place, from the resident’s first report through to what was decided and why. The photos and video the resident sent sit with the record rather than in someone’s inbox. Priority and vulnerability flags are visible instead of buried in a note. When someone rings, whoever picks up has the same picture as the person managing the work, so the answer takes seconds rather than a call back. Managers can see where jobs are stacking up before those jobs turn into complaints, which is a considerably better moment to intervene than after.

Nobody budgets for chasing. It does not appear in repairs cost per unit and it does not show up in first-time fix. It just quietly absorbs a large part of your team’s week, every week. It is worth an hour to work out roughly what yours costs, because it is almost certainly the cheapest thing on the list to fix.