Every business has these kinds of customers. Hopefully your only plan for dealing with them is not to make it more difficult for all of your customers to contact you, including the 99% who never bother you.

Nope. We answer the phone the same for everyone. And we already have a web portal that does all of this. But none of our customers use it. They want to complain in person or over the phone.

I get that making it easier to file complaints can be bad, but there seems to be a software solution here. Things like prioritizing the work orders from tenants that seldom file complaints, or use the work order history to calculate to total cost of the tenant and price the lease renewal accordingly. This might all be impractical for legal reasons, but having the data seems like a good first step to solving the problem.

I think one issue here is that the majority of tenants do not see entering in a work order online as a viable or quick resolution. If someone's toilet overflows at 3am, they need someone awake and responding right then if possible. To them, entering a request for plumbing repair seems like getting in line at the DMV, and to be honest, it would feel like that to me as well.

Not decrying a software solution, but while I pay almost every bill online, most of the tenants I've had just pay cash or check, and we have an online option.

I stayed at a place where you could place online work orders. That was a much better interface than calling up. I did not place more work orders because of it, but I did them sooner. So, the number of days that the garbage disposal did not work or the smoke alarm battery remained dead went way down. It shouldn't be difficult to screen for spurious work orders such as "dangerous spiders".