Rajanee Balaram has been a resident of TATA Housing Rasina Residency in New Delhi for the past three years, and also the Vice President of its 8-member Management Committee. We spoke to Rajanee to get insight into the everyday challenges as a member of the committee and how MyGate is helping her keep these challenges at bay.
What made Rasina Residency feel the need for a solution like MyGate?
After the committee was formed, within the first few weeks we noticed there were a lot of gaps in how people were let into the society. People walk in and out randomly and it was very difficult to keep a tab on the overall activity. And, of course, the society communications happened in silos. There was a Whatsapp group, and there was a Google group. But again, everyone was not on the Whatsapp group so there was a separate Telegram group as well. Thus, it was all mixed up.
Complaint Management was another pressing challenge. Residents would raise complaints, and we, as a committee, would maintain excel spreadsheets. The information was manually imported as there was no automated workflow. We could barely make sense out of the data to derive any sort of analysis.
Thus, we knew we wanted to introduce a society management app and decided to outline our options after a bit of research. That’s how we shortlisted about 3 to 4 companies and spoke to them over two weekends. After thorough consideration, we opted for MyGate.
What was your residents’ response to MyGate’s installation?
The residents were extremely enthusiastic, quite literally, as we told them we are using MyGate. They immediately downloaded the app. I already started getting messages from people saying that they have downloaded the app, now what? This was before I’d even got the dashboard access.
We also spoke to the residents to inform them why we chose MyGate – because of the simple interface and for the unified solution that it is critical for visitor and society management. We wrapped up very, very quickly and today, nearly 90% of the residents are onboarded.
How did your guards react to this new way of enhancing security in your gated community?
Our guards were quite receptive of the idea and picked up really well. We never felt any reluctance from their end. Initially, there were a couple of areas where they were doing the wrong thing or they were not realising the importance of doing something right. However, they kept learning every day and we have now managed to eliminate all of the initial hiccups. Right now, I think we are quite tight in terms of managing visitor entries.
One of the other things that is really good about MyGate is, the message to the guard. I keep telling residents that if you have any issues, for example, cab entries, just text back to the guard. That way, we can just download the report. It saves a lot of time and effort.
Could you highlight a few features that have helped you simplify your daily responsibilities?
Actually a bunch of them. To begin with, I think the management of daily help who come in and go out has become so much better. We know that everybody who is coming in is registered and verified.
In terms of complaint management, it’s very simple to raise a complaint as it sits in the correct category. We are not required to choose a category for each complaint.
And I think in terms of notifications, it is a breeze. Communicating with the residents has become so easy. There was this time when our lift got stuck and the technician had been called. The maintenance went on for four hours, so a message went out to all the residents and there was not one complaint on the residents’ group because they were all informed.
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