Aligning with Our Customers

Judy Gillies
Feb 20, 2017
2 min read

Creating optimal cleaning operations together

Ahhh...the good old days. Remember them? Facility departments employed several managers and provided them with good, solid budgets for cleaning a facility the way it needed to be cleaned.

Fast forward to today: Cleaning budgets have been slashed, facilities operate with fewer managers, and finance executives constantly demand even more cost cuts, especially in the area of cleaning.

Today’s facility managers spend more time putting out fires than planning strategies for keeping their facilities clean. Simultaneously, building service contractors constantly struggle between maintaining high enough cleaning quality standards to prevent clients from drowning in complaints and keeping costs competitive enough to earn business and make a profit.

Now, more than ever, it is crucial to ensure that your cleaning operations are in alignment with the needs of our customers. These 4 essentials will help you to better meet their needs.

Make our clients look good. The facility manager may not have the expertise to fully understand what it takes to complete the cleaning on a consistent basis, nor should he need to. Our job is to help the manager look good by delivering quality results. This requires putting ourselves in our clients’ shoes and understanding their pain points. After all, they hired us to keep their facility clean, and we take the lead in this area.
Accountability tools. One of the most challenging tasks of ANY cleaning operation is keeping cleaners accountable for their work and time. Today, we use powerful tools to make this task more manageable: biometric time clocks that do not allow for buddy punching; washroom monitoring technology to ensure your cleaners are doing the prescribed washroom checks; and electronic, real-time inspection systems to ensure quality outcomes and timely attention to deficiencies.
Stay proactive. We do not wait for our clients to ask for savings. Once we are at a facility for some time, we will have a good understanding of traffic flow and can possibly recommend a reallocation of resources that could save the customer money without compromising quality. In some cases, we may even help to improve it.
Educating along the way. There are times when we go above and beyond with service delivery. We are here not only to provide quality service but to educate our clients on the work being performed at their facility. Documenting these points in our regular reporting and presenting them to our clients in a meaningful way is key to strengthening our partnership.