Sunday, 7.52am. An email with the subject boiler and one line in it. It's broken again, no hot water, please can someone come today. No address, because the tenant assumes you know who they are, and no phone number, because it is in your records somewhere.
On Monday morning that email is one of forty. Someone reads it, finds the tenant in the system, finds the property, finds the landlord's standing instruction on repairs, and rings the plumber. The tenant has heard nothing for 26 hours and has emailed twice more.
The system reads the email on Sunday at 7.53. It matches the sender to a tenancy, so the address and the landlord come up. It classifies the issue as heating, no hot water, and checks the landlord's instruction. A ticket is created in Fixflo or your own sheet with a reference number. The tenant gets a reply at 7.54 that says the request is logged, gives the reference, and asks two things the plumber will want to know: the boiler make and whether the pressure gauge is in the green.
Then it goes to the contractor. Your usual heating engineer gets a WhatsApp with the address, the tenant's number, the make, and three slots the tenant has said work for them. The engineer replies with a slot. The tenant is told. The landlord gets one line on Monday at 8am with the ticket reference and the cost band if you keep one.
Every message in the chain lands on the ticket. If the engineer goes quiet for a day, the ticket flags and the property manager gets a nudge. When the job is marked done, the tenant is asked if the hot water is back. If they say no, the ticket reopens on its own.
The property manager still decides anything unusual. A leak into the flat below, or a quote above the landlord's instruction. Those go to a human with the whole thread attached.
We build this to sit on the inbox you already use. The tenant emails the same address they always have. The reply arrives on Sunday at 7.54 rather than on Monday after lunch.