Perception vs. Reality... Amazingly enough, only about a third of the tenants in a typical Class A office building believe that their building's maintenance staff responds to service requests in less than two hours. In fact, only 73% believes that their staff even responds the same day. That's according to Kingsley Associates, a real estate performance benchmarking and management consulting firm, headquartered in San Francisco. (Questions? E-mail Nick Murray.)

Well, Steve Hassett, CEO of Atlanta-based iTendant, hopes that his service can change both the perception and the reality. Last week Hassett began a WebEx demo with iTendant's "Category Summary Report." This report includes a line item for each type of service request, e.g., HVAC, Security, Janitorial, etc., and columns showing the number of requests and the "Median Response Time." So there it is in black and white -- exactly how many minutes it took to respond to various types of requests. And, if you want to be brutal, you can track how long it took individual engineers to respond to different types of calls.

Currently iTendant is deployed in about 20 million square feet, including Cingular's headquarters where 4,000 employees have access to iTendant for both external and internal requests. For example, an internal service request might be to the IT department for computer help (wish I had that!). In fact, iTendant finds that internal requests outnumber external requests by about two to one.

iTendant relies upon centralizing requests through its web service and then automatically routing these requests to the most appropriate person -- manager, engineer, vendor -- via the communication medium of choice -- phone, PDA, web. So the setup is critical. Hassett wants to position his service as a competitive advantage by enabling both leasing agents and property managers to vividly demonstrate the reality of service provided to tenants.

--Peter Pike