Questions To Consider Before You Switch Cleaning Companies

How do you know that the change will be better for your company? It might seem like a better deal, but the grass is not always greener on the other side. Even if your cleaning company is not ideal, here are key questions to ask before you make that switch.

Here are some common complaints that we have heard over the years in the cleaning industry.

• “Our current cleaner will do a good job for a while, but it seems like they get sloppy if I don’t stay on top of them. This happened with the last two companies we worked with.”
• “They do an okay job, but not a great job, but I don’t know if we are ever going to find a cleaning company that does a great job.”
• “How do I know that you are going to do a better job than the current cleaning company we have?”

The good news for anyone stuck in a bad relationship with poor quality cleaning services is there is hope. There are good reputable cleaning companies that provide excellent services to residential and commercial customers. The bad news is that it is hard to know who are the good companies and who are the bad ones.

Here are three key questions to ask any cleaning company at interview time to distinguish a company that is reliable and one that is just trying to make a sale.

Would you provide me with a brief overview of your company’s service philosophy and strategy for company growth?

Here are the clues that you are looking for when they respond to this question.

Unhelpful response: “there is no job to small or large for our company. We provide great services because we have great people. Our managers are the best in the business, and we have been doing this for more than 30 years.”

This is a typical canned response that doesn’t tell you anything helpful about them and only leaves you feeling like you got pitched a canned sales pitch.

Helpful response: “The first step in our process is to determine what your needs and service expectations are for your company. Then we design a program that will meet your service needs and budgetary requirements. We believe that consistent long-term services are sound hiring and training practices, accountability and encouragement from our managers, and regular meeting with our customers to monitor successes or failures and get them corrected quickly. Our growth strategy will not impact our existing customers; we believe that every customer should be treated like family and build long-term relationships with them.”

What is the leadership structure of your company? Who is my direct contact? How long have you been with the company? What is your employee turnover rate?

Every company should have a leadership structure to ensure quality at your facility and to your customers. These series of questions should provide insight into the structure, quality of service and stability in the primary contact role and the support roles to assist should issues arise. Turnover is widespread in many cleaning companies and is an ongoing challenge. However, you should be seeking a vendor partner with a low turnover rate. It they don’t know what their turnover rate is or it is very high, they may not be the company for you.

Do you work with companies like ours? What is their size? Will you provide names of current customers for us to contact? Tell me about the businesses that you have lost.

This question provides a great opportunity to probe into how well the cleaning company knows their clients. It will also give you insight into how they handle customer complaints and resolve them in a timely and effective manner.