Customer Survey for House Cleaning Clients

Customer surveys What are customer surveys, and why do they count? Why do they matter? Why do we need them? We’re going to talk about that today.

Hi there I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer Now, today’s show is brought to us.

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com It is the best of the best in the industry service providers for your home Alrighty, now on to customer surveys What is a customer survey? A customer survey is when you ask your customer a series of questions, and the answers they give you let you know if you’re doing a good job or a bad job or what you could improve on to provide better customer service Now, when I first started my house cleaning business, I got all cool and everything, and I printed up this little customer survey card, and I would leave it at my customer’s houses, and that was it.

I never saw them again, I never heard of them again, no one ever returned them I got no feedback I’m like, “Well, that’s weird Doesn’t make any sense, but okay” I hired a third-party independent service that called my customers up on the phone, and they came back and said, “Here are the answers,” and they were these crummy, pithy little answers that didn’t give me any feedback whatsoever.

I discovered that my customers were quiet people They don’t like confrontation They didn’t want to hurt my feelings, and so they were only saying things like, “Oh, yeah She does a good job,” but that didn’t give me any information, and so I had to change what I was doing because the regular traditional customer survey was not working Here is how the customer surveys work.

There is only one time that you can ask a series of questions, and that is right in the very beginning when you don’t know the customer and the customer has no emotional involvement to you When a customer calls you and they ask you, “Hey, can you come over to my house and bid a contract?” Now there’s a series of questions right now that you can ask, and what you’re asking is not, “Did I do a good job,” but, “Did the previous house cleaner for you do a good job?” Right now, because they called you on the phone, obviously something is amiss, otherwise that person wouldn’t have left or they wouldn’t have been fired or whatever Now, you’re going to put on your little detective hat, you’re going to pull out your big magnifying glass, and you’re going to determine if this a high-maintenance customer is and that’s the reason why the house cleaner left or did the house cleaner get fired because they were a sloppy house cleaner? You have to determine which it is Right now, you get to ask these questions that you’re never going to be able to ask again because they’re not going to come back later and tell you things of the reason why the previous house cleaner was let go In the very beginning, you go to do the walkthrough, and you’re going to ask a question like, “Hey, you called me, and so I’m sensing that the previous house cleaner didn’t work out.

Can you share with me what you would have done differently, all things being equal?” and they’ll go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, my other house cleaner forgot this or forgot that or they skipped this, or they breezed through that” They’re going to give you information, and so if you have a worksheet and you’re walking through the house with them, you can make notes Those notes become your customer service plan for this customer It’s amazing because I always ask my customer, on the initial walkthrough, I ask them this question, “How will you know when your house is clean?” and they say, “Oh, well, I would know because my house will smell clean” Well, you and I both know that clean does not have a scent, so they’re expecting the house to smell a certain way.

What is that way? Does your house smell like Pine-Sol when you’re done? Does it smell like essential oils? For that customer, you need to find out what it is We had customers that associated the smell of clean with Pine-Sol, so we would clean the entire house with the regular chemicals, or chemical-free cleaning solutions that we used, and when we left, we would pour a cap full of Pine-Sol in the toilet, and as it would sit there in the toilet, the aroma would make the house smell “clean” To that customer, that is what the clean smell meant, and so if their house smelt like Pine-Sol, then to them, that meant their house was clean There was another man who said that “I will know my house is clean because all of the rugs that have those little tassels on them, they will all be combed instead of just being left there” Oh, okay, so we will vacuum, and then we will comb the fringe.

Then there was another customer who said, “I will know you have dusted the blinds when all of the blinds, all of the wooden blinds are slightly turned so that they’re facing in an upward direction,” so she could walk in and look at all of the blinds and see that all of the blinds had been done Every customer has their own little weird quirks, but if you don’t ask this question, you’ll never know The homeowner will come home after the house cleaner has left, and they will see their home, and they will say, “Well, my house cleaner didn’t do a very good job” They didn’t do a very good job because they forgot to comb the tassels on your carpet, but everything else is spectacular, or they did everything perfectly, but they forgot to twist the blinds slightly backwards They’re little tiny things, but you’re going to pick up on this in the very, very, very beginning conversation that you have with your customers because your customers will tell you, and once you make a note of that and once you understand what is important to them, now guess what? You meet their standard of excellence, and the other house cleaner, who’s probably amazing but didn’t know the right questions to ask, skipped a couple of things that were important to those people, and therefore, they lost the job.

If you go back to a customer’s house over and over and you’re not meeting their expectation, they just assume you don’t know what clean looks like, but it’s different It’s different for every person There’s no possible way you could know what this particular customer wants, so you have to ask, and then you have to jump through hoops to make sure that you do those things Now, for me, it was easier to just make a running list They want the carpet fringe combed, they want the blinds turned slightly upward, they want a cap full of Pine-Sol in their toilet, or whatever it is.

For those customers, we would do all of those things to all of those customers’ houses so that everybody had a very consistent pattern One woman said, “My bathroom is not clean unless you fold the toilet paper into a little triangle” That’s an easy fix We can do that All of the requests from the customers are things that took about two seconds to do, so it wasn’t very time-consuming at all, but to them, it showed we cared.

That’s it That’s it That’s all the customer survey is about, is to say we care You had a request, we paid attention, and a customer that knows and feels like you care is a customer for life Alrighty, that’s my two cents for today, and until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.

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