As a cleaning service owner, you’re always looking for ways to improve your services. You stay up to date on the latest products, and you enjoy thinking up new ways to impress clients with finishing touches. As important as it is to continue perfecting your service, it’s just as—if not more—important to optimize your cleaning service management.
All day long, you’re dealing with small but critical details like appointment times, worker availability, payment schedules, and product inventory. Your ability to simultaneously manage all these different areas determines your productivity and profit—and your peace of mind.
To best manage your cleaning service, focus on three key domains: time, money, and relationships. In each of these domains, there are simple solutions to your biggest organizational headaches. And, by taking this holistic view of your cleaning service management, you’ll be able to see new possibilities for optimization and improvement.
Save time by streamlining all your daily processes
Consider your sales cycle. Each step in your sales process, from connecting with leads to scheduling a customer’s first cleaning service, should be systematized. One huge way to streamline and save time is to automate your customer communications. Most customers have the same questions and concerns, and having the same conversations over and over is a big time suck for you and your employees. Automatic responses to customer calls, emails, and texts quickly provide your clients with the information that they need and don’t require you to take a minute away from running other parts of the business.
Scheduling is often another problematic area for cleaning service businesses. If you don’t manage your time well, you can end up engaging in endless back-and-forth with your customers and service workers. Things get even more complicated when someone wants to cancel or make a reservation at the last minute. Luckily, you can easily set up an online scheduling system that is both internal and client-facing. Offer instant booking to your clients while making sure that your workers always know which jobs they’re assigned to.
Take your automation a step further by using ServiceWork’s route optimization software, which sends your workers out to cleaning jobs in the same neighborhood or on the same route.
Take advantage of technology to manage your finances
No aspect of your business is more critical to its success than your financial management. If you’re still keeping track of revenue and payments in a simple excel sheet, you’re giving yourself unnecessary headaches and opening yourself up to the possibility of making silly errors in calculation.
These days, customers expect to be able to pay online and to store their payment information for future billings. ServiceWorks makes this process easy by integrating a payment platform with invoice tracking and QuickBooks syncing. When you use the platform, all your financial data is connected, so you don’t have to enter appointments, sales, and payments multiple times in different places.
Analytics are also key when it comes to your money management. Syncing your financial information allows the platform to spot trends that will help you save money and maximize profit.
Nurture your relationships as an investment in your cleaning service’s future
Two relationships lie at the foundation of your business’s success: your relationship with your clients and your relationship with your workers. If you follow the tips mentioned in this article to expedite your response times and facilitate your scheduling and payment processes, you will already be making your clients’ lives easier. But, there’s more you can do to keep your customers satisfied.
Ask for and reply to customer feedback for each cleaning job you complete. You might think that it’s enough to get feedback after just the first job, but asking for constant feedback shows the customer that you’re truly invested in doing a great job every time. Plus, customer needs can change over time and asking for continued feedback gives customers an open space to share new wishes and desires.
Without your cleaning service workers, you wouldn’t have a business. Show your workers how much you value them by asking for their feedback as well. As the people out cleaning every day, they have great insight into ways to improve the service. They also know what parts of the job are a real pain and lower morale. Their performance directly impacts your customers’ satisfaction, so you should always consider their needs alongside those of your customers.The relationship that you have with your workers has a huge impact on how motivated they feel to represent your brand.
An online system such as ServiceWorks can provide task lists to simplify your cleaning works’ jobs. It’s hard to keep track of which customer likes to have his windows washed every week and which prefers that vacuuming not start until 10 am. Instead of having to deal with disorganized notes, they can pull up a complete list of tasks for each job and start checking them off right away.
Try a tool made especially for cleaning service management
If there’s something in your business that you’re struggling with, there’s probably a tool out there to help. There are so many resources that can help with your cleaning service management, so don’t get lost in the details! Try ServiceWorks free for 14 days, no credit card needed, to experience a new and better management system.
