A complaint without an owner is not a complaint
In a chat group, attention follows volume rather than need — so the resident who escalates gets fixed and the one who waits politely does not. That is a queue problem, not a character problem.
A complaint posted in a residents’ WhatsApp group has no owner. Three people react to it, one says they will look into it, and by morning it has scrolled out of view. Nothing was assigned and nothing had a deadline.
This is not a small inefficiency. It is the reason maintenance in most societies feels arbitrary.
Attention follows volume, not need
Without a queue, the complaint that gets attention is the one raised most loudly and most often. A resident who escalates gets fixed; a resident who reports once and waits politely does not. Committees know this and dislike it, and are structurally unable to prevent it, because they have no list to work from.
The patient resident eventually concludes the society does not work. They are not wrong — it does not, for them.
Three things a ticket has that a message does not
It exists after the conversation moves on. It has exactly one owner rather than an audience. And it has a date by which something must happen, which is what creates the moment where somebody is late.
That last one matters more than the other two combined. An SLA with no escalation is a target, and targets are aspirational. An SLA that automatically involves somebody more senior when it is breached is a commitment, and commitments change behaviour.
The reporting is the point
Once complaints are tickets, turnaround time becomes a number rather than an impression — and the distribution is more informative than the average. A category with a two-hour median and a nine-day tail does not have a general problem; it has a specific problem in a specific subset of jobs, and the average conceals precisely that.
It also connects things that were previously unconnected. Six lift stoppages in two months read as six inconveniences in a chat group. Attached to the asset, they read as a machine approaching the end of its life and a capital decision to plan for.