Granlund is launching a new service that collects continuous user feedback on buildings and connects it to building services. The service provides a large amount of new information for building maintenance, enabling improvements to conditions, technical functionality and energy efficiency while boosting the well-being of people and buildings.
In the Western world, people spend 90 per cent of their time indoors. Comfort in buildings cannot be ignored. The idea for the user-oriented nature of Granlund PULSE was sparked by Granlund’s experts, who had long been discussing how user feedback could be combined with building services to provide continuous feedback.
”The fact is that even if we measure and fine-tune the building services to the ideal conditions, people may still feel hot or uncomfortable, or get frustrated by a buzzing light. The feelings of these people often get overlooked in favour of technology, so we wanted to come up with a solution for combining these two things to provide continuous feedback,” says Heikki Ihasalo, Senior Consultant at Granlund.
Previously, user feedback has been collected once or twice per year using questionnaires.
”These questionnaires come up against the problem of respondents’ motivation and issues of interpretation. How can you know whether the negative user feedback received in early January is down to the conditions in the building or has more to do with the end of the Christmas season?” Ihasalo wonders.
Innovation combined with strong expertise
The PULSE service combines user satisfaction with Granlund’s core expertise – improving energy efficiency, conditions and technical functionality. The service links the well-being of building users with building services in a simple way.
There is a large number of measurable variables but Granlund PULSE makes it as simple as possible to monitor results for your own property.
”Changes in well-being are reported to the building’s owner and manager in real time with an easy-to-understand figure – the building’s pulse. This was the inspiration for the name, Granlund PULSE,” says Senior Consultant Rami Hursti, who was involved in developing the service.
According to Hursti, simply combining a large amount of data to create a single figure does not reveal everything. The data must be analysed and refined.
”Decoding a single figure to lead to practical benefits requires analysis and planning. Granlund’s experts work with the property’s owner and managers to go through the ways in which the figure provided by Granlund PULSE can be improved and how the property can be made to work better.
Aiming for a comprehensive feedback system
Granlund PULSE also offers up the feedback collected from the property to the building’s users. As such, people are able to see how the owners and managers have reacted to feedback and what the conditions are like in the building.
Ihasalo believes that user feedback helps property owners to significantly improve their operations.
”In the future, we envisage people giving feedback on properties and internal conditions in the same way as they give feedback in hotels and restaurants. The idea is that the well-being of the property – and thereby also its users – is a key strength that the owner can really benefit from.
We wanted to make giving feedback as easy as possible, so we have deployed a large range of channels. Feedback can be provided using a mobile device, a traditional website, user feedback buttons located on properties or by clicking on the signature of an email. In the future, it may be possible to download a Granlund PULSE application from a mobile app store.
”The most important thing for obtaining feedback from users is to make it easy and hassle-free. There must be several ways of giving feedback and they must be available whenever they are needed. Situations can easily be forgotten if people have to return to their desks and log in to the intranet in order to give feedback,” says Ihasalo.
