Reactive maintenance requests, out of the inbox and into a queue
Repair requests arrive by email from managing agents, facilities managers and occupiers. Dispatch Layer turns each one into a ticket with the right client, a priority and an SLA clock. When it needs a visit, your team raises the Simpro job from the ticket.
Every email in the inbox is somebody's priority
Reactive work does not arrive in a tidy format. One agent sends a works order with a PO, another writes two lines about a blocked drain, and a facilities manager forwards a tenant's photos with "can someone look at this?".
Someone has to read each one, work out which client and property it is for, decide how urgent it is and get it into Simpro. On a busy morning the emergency and the routine job look the same in an inbox.
Dispatch Layer does the reading and sorting so your coordinators start from a prioritised queue rather than an unread count.
From repair request to Simpro job
The request comes in
A managing agent emails about a leak at one of their blocks. It arrives in your shared mailbox as it always has and usually becomes a ticket within a minute.
It is matched and prioritised
The ticket is matched to the client who sent it, put in your category for that trade and given a priority. Anything unclear is held for a person to check.
The clock starts
Where the client has agreed response times, the SLA clock comes from their contract. The ticket goes to the right queue or straight to an engineer.
The job or quote is raised
Your team raises the Simpro job, or a quote if it needs pricing, from the ticket. They choose the property from the client's sites and add the PO if there is one.
A job is never created without someone choosing to create it. Read more about how the shared mailbox helpdesk works.
What changes for the coordinators
Urgent work does not wait in line
Every request gets a priority as it arrives. The workboard shows the highest priority work first, so an emergency is not buried under routine jobs.
Every client on one desk
Agents, facilities managers and occupiers all email the same address. Each request is matched to the right client, with their own response times.
No chasing for an update
Once the Simpro job is raised, its stage comes back onto the ticket as your engineers move it. Anyone on the desk can answer a chase without opening Simpro.
A record agents cannot argue with
Every ticket has a timestamped record of when the request arrived and when your team replied, kept in an audit log that cannot be edited.
Common questions
- Do managing agents have to change how they send work?
- No. They keep emailing your usual address. Dispatch Layer reads the shared mailbox behind it, so there is no portal for them to log into and nothing new to agree with each agent.
- How does it tell an emergency from a routine repair?
- Each request is given a priority from what the email says, so a leak through a ceiling is not queued behind a sticking door. Anything unclear goes to a review queue for a person to decide, rather than being guessed.
- Where does the client's PO number go?
- When you raise the Simpro job or quote from the ticket, there is a box for the client's PO or order number, and it goes into the Order No field in Simpro. If they did not give one, it stays blank.
- Can we quote before doing the work?
- Yes. Raise a Simpro quote from the ticket instead of a job. When the client accepts and the quote is converted into a job in Simpro, the ticket picks up the job by itself.
- What happens when the agent replies with more detail?
- A reply to the same email thread joins the ticket it belongs to, so the access arrangements and the original request sit together with whoever is handling it.
- Do we need Simpro?
- No. The ticketing, priorities, SLA tracking and audit log work on their own. Simpro is the field service system we connect to today, for raising jobs and quotes and following their progress.
- Which mailboxes does it work with?
- Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes, connected through the Microsoft Graph API. Google Workspace is on the roadmap but not available today.
See it with your own repair requests
Connecting your shared mailbox takes under an hour. The Simpro connection starts read-only, so nothing is created in your build until you decide.