Improving business processes in commercial cleaning: Productivity and customer satisfaction

Our current blog series, “Improving Business Processes in Commercial Cleaning,” is dedicated to helping janitorial businesses understand how changes in day-to-day processes impact performance, efficiency, and growing your bottom line. So far, we’ve covered the importance of optimizing staff scheduling and visibility in staffing, and finally, we’ll be capping off the three-part series by improving productivity and customer satisfaction. 

Productivity and customer satisfaction go hand in hand. Your ability to increase productivity not only goes towards increased work quality but also makes it easier to demonstrate to clients the value of your services. If you streamline your processes and follow a standardized workflow that enables all employees to work at their full potential, customer satisfaction will experience a drastic impact.

But finding ways to bolster productivity in the commercial cleaning business isn’t easy. Sometimes it takes a chain of small optimizations before results are noticed. Regardless, no matter what stage of growth your business is at, there are strategies and tools available to help you achieve more.

Task management

It’s easy to get lost in the status quo. You build your company based on the services you know and focus on clients you're familiar with. This makes jobs simple for staffing and easy for them to get through their day-to-day without too much concern. But as you expand into new areas, new clients, and new service types, sticking to the motions of what is familiar doesn’t always translate to efficient work. 

Optimizing how you prep your teams for jobs of all types is important. If you have a systematic approach to taking on work, familiar or new, it becomes easier to expand into new regions, take on new work types, and onboard new crews. This templated approach includes everything you need to prepare your teams for the incoming job. 

The best way to tackle this is to create a task management system listing the responsibilities required for each job. The list of tasks may include things like:

• Rooms to be serviced

• Specialized services requested

• Equipment to use

• Surfaces to clean

• Furnishing

• Floor cleanings 

• Wall cleanings

• Exterior work

To enhance this list, you should include details on what surfaces require cleaning, including detailed notes on which chemicals or equipment to use. A standardized list like this prepares your crews for any job, especially if someone has to fill in at the last minute for an absence. This is the key to creating shared experience and expertise so that everyone in your organization can maintain your quality standards with customers. 

The next step is ensuring your task management system gets put to use. Often, workers create lists or tasks that need to be performed, but tracking the completion and quality becomes a problem if there’s no consistent monitoring of those metrics. Operations and office staff need a way to track tasks, conduct site audits, and communicate with their clients. Without the technology to do so, businesses are often left manually tracking tasks and results, affecting quality. 

Optimized management software

Investing in software solutions specifically designed for commercial cleaning businesses helps standardize processes across all facets of the company. The right software also provides enhanced real-time reporting on critical data. 

Aspire is designed specifically for the commercial cleaning industry, giving you day-to-day visibility into scheduling, site inspections, and employee management.

The priority task management capabilities in Aspire are designed to ensure that all client work is performed according to the contract. This allows employees to quickly run down the list of tasks assigned at a specific client site and mark them off as they’re completed. With deeper visibility into operations in the field, office staff can ensure work is completed on time and in its entirety. 

With Aspire janitorial solutions, priority task management allows organizations to:

• Understand, daily, which required tasks need to be completed.

• Respond quickly when a new or fill-in staff member performs work at a new client site.

• Receive timestamps of completed work to monitor progress and efficiencies to assist with proper scheduling and staffing.

• Determine if work was completed too quickly, potentially compromising quality and customer satisfaction.

• Realize full accountability of staff and client communications regarding work completed or neglected.

Want to experience software designed to help janitorial companies achieve growth at twice the industry rate? Schedule a commercial cleaning software demonstration with Aspire and see how you can take your business efficiencies to the next level.