Preventative maintenance doesn’t just help you. It also keeps your commercial cleaning clients happy.
Are your commercial cleaning clients happy? Could they be happier? Does it matter as long as your team shows up and does the job they’re supposed to?
These might seem like strange questions. Most of your clients probably don’t give much thought to how happy they are with your work. They just want things to be clean and tidy for a reasonable price. That seems simple enough. It’s also a pretty low standard to reach. After all, that’s just what’s in the contract.
The problem is that doing the minimum isn’t going to help you stand out. The bare minimum won’t create a base of clients who recommend you to their business partners. It won’t help you build lasting relationships or win those lucrative contracts.
Approaching the work in a way that assumes it’s enough to show up and do an acceptable, if not stellar job won’t help you grow your business.
This isn’t to suggest that you do extra work or spend hours polishing brass fixtures that you aren’t paid to do. What we’re looking at here is that little spark of customer service that keeps your cleaning clients happy and excited about working with you.
There are several ways to create that customer service spark. Excellent communication, checking in, or simply saying hello to people can help you stand out as a service provider. But if you really want to take it to the next level, preventative maintenance is vital.
Preventative maintenance helps your business. That’s no surprise. But what does maintenance have to do with happy clients? More than you might think.
From maintenance schedules to task lists to work orders, Janitorial manager can help you organize your operations. Schedule a free call with Janitorial Manager to learn more.
Commercial cleaning clients, preventative maintenance, and happiness all around
Let’s step out of the world of commercial cleaning and building services for a moment. It’s Sunday afternoon. You’re at your favorite lunch spot, ready to order the burger and fries and watch the game you’ve been looking forward to for a few days.
Then the waitstaff tells you the fryer is broken and there are no fries. Disappointing, for sure, but not the end of the world. At least you still have the burger and the big-screen television. Except, it turns out, that the sound went out on the television yesterday and no one has had a chance to fix it.
Your relaxing, nice afternoon is going downhill fast. But the most frustrating part is that some preventative maintenance could have taken care of these problems before they ever began.
Now imagine a similar scene with your commercial cleaning clients. They have a VIP visitor or a significant business meeting coming up. But instead of a sparkling floor and spotless meeting room, they see your team struggling to repair an essential piece of equipment. Even worse, this situation was entirely avoidable with a little preventative maintenance.
Let’s look at all of the things happening here.
To begin with, anytime your equipment breaks down, you lose any hope of efficiency. Work comes to a standstill for at least part of your team as they try to troubleshoot the issue and get things up and running again. If that doesn’t work, you have to spend money for a rental and take time out of the schedule to get the equipment on site. And that’s assuming there’s a rental available. If you’re working an evening or overnight, you can count on working without your equipment for at least the rest of the shift.
Things are even worse from the point of view of your cleaning clients. From their perspective, they are now paying for your team to fiddle around rather than do the cleaning they should be doing. They’re looking at a tile floor with spots and streaks while a big account is on the way over to meet them. That puts them in a tough spot, knowing their facilities aren’t looking their best.
Preventative maintenance, on the other hand, can help you avoid these situations. Will regular maintenance keep your equipment from ever breaking down? No. But it will extend the life of your equipment and make it much more unlikely that you (and your commercial cleaning clients) will experience these unexpected problems.
That keeps your clients happy, knowing they’re getting the high-quality work you provide. And they can count on you and your team to make them look good.
How to track your preventative maintenance
With so many different models of commercial cleaning equipment, along with the type of usage they get, it’s challenging to keep up with a preventative maintenance schedule when everything is on paper or scattered across multiple systems.
You also need to plan your maintenance in the least disruptive way you can. Under normal circumstances, things can get complicated when you’re juggling maintenance schedules with client service schedules. However, there is a simple way to do just that.
First, refer to your User’s Manual to determine how often and what kind of maintenance each piece of equipment needs. Then, if you use software like Janitorial Manager, it’s just a matter of plugging it into your schedule. You can customize your workloading and checklists to seamlessly integrate into your service schedule, so your clients will never notice a difference.
What they will notice is that there are no gaps in service. Your equipment is always clean and running smoothly. And your team works as efficiently as ever.
Keep track of all your scheduled maintenance and other equipment needs. Schedule a free call with Janitorial Manager to learn how mobile-friendly scheduling software can help you keep your cleaning business running.