4 ways to optimize customer satisfaction with janitorial scheduling

Competitive advantages are integral to the lifespan of a commercial cleaning business. Your ability to stand out to new customers and build a reputation of success with recurring customers is key to growing in the janitorial industry. When it comes to optimizing a janitorial business to stand out, scheduling doesn’t often hit the top of the priority list.

In truth, scheduling is imperative to how you stand out to new clients.

Scheduling is really the glue that keeps your business flowing throughout the day, week, and month. Without schedules, employees don’t show up to work locations, no one gets paid, and work doesn’t get done. These are just some of the internal impacts scheduling can have on a business, but have you considered how they impact your customers?

The answer might surprise you, and surprises are never good for growth. In this article, we’re breaking down the four ways you can use flexible scheduling to your customer satisfaction advantage.

Eliminate inefficient scheduling with consistent management

When scheduling is ad hoc, rather than consistent and efficient, customer satisfaction suffers, and employee satisfaction and retention also suffers. Your employees need consistency and reliability regarding their schedules. Most employees have to be timely when it comes to their work. This timeliness starts before their job even begins—in the scheduling department.

When it comes to identifying red flags in the consistency of your scheduling, look out for these pitfalls:

• Employees have to call in or reach out to other colleagues to get info on their weekly or daily schedule
• The scope of scheduling is small, limiting employees to only a daily or by week basis
• You have low visibility into when employees clock in or out, where they’re currently at, or how long they’ve been at a site
• Your schedules are built offline, using manual paper trails that require additional work to log later

In terms of employee satisfaction, creating a consistent and efficient system for time management shows them you care as an employer. This is how you foster a culture of efficiency and bolster employee retention.

Help your employees by:

• Reducing downtime
• Keeping them moving from one location to the other
• Providing them with the tools they need to be successful
• Creating a culture of transparency

The right tools make a difference. Finding a digital tool for your scheduling needs can make it easier to streamline time management, get instant insight into schedules throughout your organization, and create consistent processes that keep your team flexible and efficient.

Creating consistency in quality of service

The commercial cleaning industry is volatile enough, you don’t need to add to the chaos with inconsistent processes in your own operations. More consistent scheduling leads to increased levels of productivity and customer service.

Additional benefits include:

• Cleaning staff know when and where they need to be always
• Schedules can be adjusted quickly and, on the fly to meet customer needs
• Staff is constantly kept in the loop so they can prepare as needed
• Deadlines are easier to hit, and the margin of error for missed deadlines is much wider

This not only increases customer confidence in your company but further increases the consistency and efficiency in daily tasks. Focusing on the visibility of hour-by-hour activities allows your management team to monitor performance better and make strategic adjustments as needed.

If staff cannot work on a particular day or does not show up to a particular location, office staff can quickly respond and send another crew to complete the tasks at hand. In addition, office staff can provide a list of tasks and allow field staff to report on completion quickly and easily.

This is why your scheduling tool needs to be able to provide live insights into the happenings of your business. You need instant insight into where your staff is at a given moment, their current progress, and what’s next on the chopping block. With this information, you can create processes that foster a standard of excellence throughout the entire business. Your customers will feel this consistent performance level and benefit your growth tremendously.

Improve customer satisfaction through communication

No customer wants to feel neglected. That’s why you need fast and responsive communication with clients to achieve the level of customer satisfaction required to stand out. This means reducing response times to issues, requests, or questions. Delays or issues can begin to whittle away at your customer’s confidence in your business.

This is why visibility into your schedule is key to enabling your communication services. Equipping your team with up-to-date information and the ability to adapt to customers’ needs will allow them to be responsive in their communication. Minor bumps in your services will leave your company unfazed because you have the technology in-house to provide the best outcome.

Try these strategies to ensure your communication services stand out:

• Connect back office roles with on-site crews
• Enable techs to take initiative and train them for decision-making opportunities
• Create resources for new clients to find answers such as FAQs or blogs

Remain flexible, always

Growth and flexibility go hand in hand. Your business can’t be too rigid in its practices if you want to last in the competitive commercial cleaning market. It is very difficult to grow without some level of flexibility in crucial business functions.

All of your scheduling functions should come down to flexibility. Being fluid is critical to generating repeat business and long-term client retention. More so, your ability to remain flexible reflects your ability to scale. You can’t expand into new markets, regions, or services without proving you can handle being adaptable to your current business functions.

Flexibility will ensure you’re ready for opportunity, and opportunity will lead to growth. But you need the right tools to get there.

The tool you’re looking for should include key features like:

• Time-based scheduling
• Absentee notifications
• Tech workload tracking
• A team-wide accessible hub for monitoring weekly and monthly schedules

Aspire offers our customers comprehensive and flexible scheduling capabilities with time-based scheduling, automated absentee notifications, and visit checklists as part of our business management software platform.

Schedule a commercial cleaning software demonstration with Aspire Software and see how to take your scheduling efficiencies to the next level.