When you own a commercial cleaning business, your obvious top priority should be how to provide top-quality cleaning to do your job in the fastest, most efficient methods using safe and effective products. After all, this is what your job is all about.
That said, this should not be your only focus. There are many other things that make people want to support your company, one of which is good customer service. While its definition might be simple enough—the assistance provided by a company before, during, and after a sale—it isn’t as straightforward to get it right.
Indeed, even if you provide the best cleaning, customers will be reluctant to do business with you if you don’t provide good customer service with it.
If you want to improve your cleaning business’s customer service or want to start things off on the right foot, here are some steps you can follow:
Know Your Business Inside and Out
Before you’re able to provide excellent customer service, you have to be a product and services expert first. This doesn’t just mean being good at cleaning and using sustainable products. Rather, it also means being a true believer in what you offer.
When you know your cleaning business inside and out, you can recommend the most suitable products and solutions in a more insightful way. This provides more value to your customers.
Know Your Customers
Speaking of your customers, you also have to get to know them to be able to provide great service. You can do this by gathering relevant data, such as when they schedule cleaning requests most often, which areas of their properties need more intensive cleaning, and the like.
This way, you can better understand the individual needs of your customers and how best to address them. It’s also a good idea to conduct market research every so often, so that you can adapt to the changing needs of your target audience.
Be Prompt
Perhaps as a product of the way technologies like the internet have made things so much more convenient, customers are now used to lightning-fast service. Obviously, there are things that take a bit of time; if your clients want thorough cleaning and disinfection, make sure to emphasise that these involve multiple steps and can’t be rushed.
That said, there are aspects of customer service that do need to be quick. These include things like responding to client comments or queries, as well as minor issues that don’t require a full day of cleaning.
To ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, you can make use of software that incorporates features like scheduling/calendaring, messaging, and time-tracking. This will centralise all of your essentials, so that you only have to monitor a couple of platforms or apps.
Provide Personalised Service
While customers would prefer you to be quick about responding to their concerns, they also don’t want you to treat them indifferently. Remember: your clients are humans and expect to be treated like so.
Thus, it’s best to avoid canned responses that sound so robotic as to be unhelpful. You should also ensure that a client’s concerns can be addressed without sending them back and forth to different departments or point persons.
Going back to the second point, getting to know your customers is crucial in providing humanised, personalised services. Take note of their unique needs so that you can tailor-fit responses and solutions for them.
Add a Self-Help Option
There are also customers who are more independent than others and prefer to try to solve things on their own first before they ask for help. This is where providing FAQs in your website would be useful. If you have a telephone hotline, you can also include voice prompts. For more modern solutions, a chatbot with detailed options can be a viable solution.
When you implement these self-help options, make sure to add a button, form, or any other method to get in touch with a real person. Doing this shows that you’re always ready to provide assistance and that you care about resolving their issues.
Create a Loyalty Program
It is more expensive for a business to find new customers than retain old ones. As such, it’s more cost-efficient for your cleaning business to have a loyalty program. If you don’t have one yet, it’s time to come up with one.
Essentially, a loyalty program is a system that rewards customers for their patronage. Some of the things you can offer include discounts after a certain amount of bookings, free trials of new products, and complimentary services after a successful referral.
What you have to remember is that loyalty programs can contribute a lot towards customer satisfaction and a satisfied customer is more likely to be loyal to your company. This is a cycle that you definitely want to repeat.
If you want your cleaning business to succeed, you should work not just on your industry expertise but also on how you treat your customers. With good customer service, you can not just boost your profit margins but also improve your reputation.