Reports sent to someone who left in spring
Water hygiene work runs through people who move around a lot. Facilities management contracts change hands. Site managers leave. The caretaker who knew where the plant room key was retires. The procurement contact who approved your quotes goes on maternity leave. Each change happens at the client end, and nobody tells you.
So monthly reports go to an address that bounces, or worse, to an inbox nobody reads. Remedial quotes wait for approval from someone who is no longer there. Engineers ring a mobile number for site access and get a stranger. You discover the change when an angry new facilities manager asks why they have never received a report.
Why contact details decay silently
| Where the contact is stored | Updated when |
|---|---|
| Accounts package | Invoice address queries |
| Report distribution list | Someone complains |
| Engineer's phone | Engineer finds out on site |
| Account manager's email | Never, formally |
| Job management system | Contract start |
The same person appears in five places, so a change reaches one of them at best. And there is often only one contact per client, when in reality each site has a site contact, the client has a facilities manager, and finance and procurement are someone else again.
The cost of talking to the wrong person
Reports that nobody reads defeat the point of reporting. Quotes stall. Invoices go unpaid because they reach someone who cannot approve them. Access fails because the keyholder has changed. And at renewal time, the new decision-maker has no relationship with you and no memory of your service.
Contact records by site and by role
- Contacts are held once, in one place, and linked to sites and clients by role: site contact, keyholder, facilities manager, accounts, procurement, responsible person where the client names one.
- Each document type goes to the roles you choose: reports to site contact and facilities manager, invoices to accounts, quotes to the approver.
- Outgoing emails are monitored for bounces and long-term out-of-office replies, which create a task to confirm the contact.
- Engineers can report a contact change from their visit form, which goes to the office to confirm.
- At an interval you choose, each client gets a short confirm-your-contacts form listing who you hold for each role, with a link to update it.
- Your other systems, such as the accounts package and job management, are updated from the central record through their APIs.
When a contact leaves, you can see every document that was going to them and reassign each role in one step.
Reports reaching someone who reads them
Bounces become tasks rather than silence. The facilities manager who starts in September is welcomed with a copy of recent reports rather than finding you later. Engineers ring the right keyholder. Account managers see at a glance who they should be building a relationship with at each client.
The history is kept as well. When a contact is replaced, the old record is marked as left rather than deleted, so you can still see who received which report and when. That matters when a new facilities manager asks what their predecessor was told about an outstanding finding.
Picture a facilities management company that loses a contract to a rival FM firm. The building stays, your contract with the building owner stays, but every contact changes. The bounce detection picks up the old addresses in the first week. The account manager sends the new FM team a confirm-your-contacts form and a short welcome pack with the site's recent records. Reports go to the right people again, rather than to empty inboxes until someone complains.
Are your contacts up to date?
- Reports bounce or go unanswered for months.
- You hold one contact for a client with many sites.
- Engineers find out about new keyholders on site.
- Contacts are stored separately in several systems.
- New facilities managers have complained they never received reports.