09/17/2024
Last night it was mail and packages…..and tonight it’s washers and dryers 🧺
This is what we do and we are passionate about it and committed to maintaining a level of service that those in Nor’easter Nation deserve ⚡️ In light of the transparency that seemed appreciated regarding the updates about the challenges that we have faced with the rollout of the Amazon Lockers on campus, and upon reviewing the concerns and frustrations outlined here in the comments, we thought there would be immense value in taking the same approach to our laundry woes. Over the past couple hours we have taken the time to perform a complete and current “health assessment” on our fleet of student facing washers and dryers on campus.
A few interesting stats that we wanted to share for context to start…... Within the 16 student facing laundry rooms conveniently located throughout our 10 residence halls on the Biddeford campus, we have 52 washing machines and 81 dryers for a total fleet of 133 machines available. As of the time of this post (7:30 pm, Tuesday, 9/17/24) all 81 dryers and 46 of the 52 washing machines were currently operational, with 6 out of order and awaiting parts for repair. We work with a contracted laundry vendor who manages these machines under the terms of our contractual agreement. While those overall statistics are pretty favorable in our humbled opinion (95% operational as of this post), regrettably and likely the reason for the frustration outlined in these posts is the fact that Featherman Hall currently has 2 of their 5 washing machines out of order. This of course is not ideal and the service team from our laundry vendor partner is aware and they are simply awaiting the arrival of the parts required to make the repairs. The technician is on campus daily (Monday – Friday) and is prompt in their repairs. For the business savvy folks on this thread, our contract is a sizeable one for the vendor and our satisfaction rate is driven directly by how the machines perform and more importantly by how quickly they are able to repair the machines. Down time equals disappointment in this equation - 100% of the time!
For those that were not previously aware, or who feel that their student may not be aware, please note that we do have a free online platform called Laundry View that provides real time updates on the status of the equipment and even allows for notifications to be set-up so that your student can receive a text notification when a machine becomes available. That site can be found by visiting https://www.laundryview.com/about and there is also a free app for your Apple devices LaundryView. Follow the prompts and select University of New England as your College.
As for the process of reporting failures in laundry equipment, when your student finds a washer or dryer not working properly they are supposed to report this to their RA. The RA’s have been trained on how to submit a work-order which comes directly to our Auxiliary Services Manager Paul Bennett in real time and then from there a ticket is created with our vendor. If everyone plays their part, we most commonly can minimize service interruption’s and keep our fleet of equipment running and our students happy – which is always our main focus!!
