Missed Appointments in North and Central Regions *UK SPECIFIC*

New Service Family Accommodation Contracts

Missed Appointments in North and Central Regions

On 12 May we informed you that Amey had identified that their scheduling tool was not operating to its full functionality. While Amey were able to receive, process and schedule appointments from the National Service Centre (NSC), the system was not always tracking engineer movements on the day of the appointment. The ‘Track My Engineer’ capability was therefore disabled until a solution was found.

We are pleased to report that the necessary changes to the scheduling tool have commenced. This means that some families will start receiving ‘Track My Engineer’ links from 31 May as part of the deployment phase. We still expect this functionality to be restored to all families in Central and North regions by 6 June and will keep families updated on this issue.

In the meantime, families will still continue to receive a one-hour arrival slot in advance of the day of the appointment. However, whilst this issue is being resolved, these slots can only be treated as an estimate and the operative will call the family when they are on their way.

Please note that VIVO’s scheduling capability in the South East and South West has not been affected by this issue and remains fully functional.

National Service Centre Telephone Call Times

We understand how frustrating it can be for families to wait on the phone for longer than a couple of minutes to speak to the National Service Centre. We are therefore pleased that call wait times have reduced considerably over the past month and they are now within the acceptable performance level of 2 minutes. On 23 May call times averaged 50 seconds and 24 May averaged 40 seconds which is an improvement on the 2.2 minute average for call waits last week.

For further information about the new FDIS Accommodation contracts that replaced the National Housing Prime contract on 1 April 2022, please continue to check the SFA Gov.UK website, Pinnacle website and Families Federations’ social media and web pages.