Here at Oakville Maids our goal is to make your home feel like a haven again. To help achieve this goal, we have made it our mission to be the best house cleaning service in Oakville, Ontario and beyond. To be the best, we need to avoid mistakes continually made by our competition. So today, I would like to present some research we have conducted on what Oakville cleaning companies are getting wrong so Oakville Maids can get it right.
Methodology
Incorporating customer feedback in our business model is one of our secrets on how to out perform other cleaning services. It’s purposely built into our DNA. We use client feedback to determine which cleaners gets performance bonuses, raises, and choice of jobs. So naturally, viewing our competitors online reviews was the first thing we did. Reading through cleaning companies’ feedback online, we categorized competitors’ issues in the following categories, listing them in order of the most common complaints:
Number of Complaints / Issue Category
- 27 / Quality of cleaning
- 14 / Poor Communication
- 10 / Bad Value
- 6 / Punctuality
- 4 / Dishonest Customer Representative
- 2 / Unfriendly Customer Representative
- 1 / Overcharged
- 1 / Bad Parking practices
- 1 / Theft
- 1 / Former employee complaint
Analysis
Then we created this nifty spreadsheet aptly entitled Bad Reviews Sheet Oakville Cleaning Services. Unsurprisingly, the quality of the cleaning was the most common with 40% of total customer complaints. Followed by poor communication, bad value, and punctuality – again, not surprising. Though unexpected was that dishonest customer representatives was an issue at all. We’ve always ensured our staff were trustworthy because not only is it vital for our office operations within, it is also a must for those who we serve out in the field. Anyway, here we will dive into the most frequent issues and explain why Oakville Maids are mostly immune to them.
Quality of Cleaning
The most cited challenge of this industry we’ve heard from owners of other cleaning services is finding good people. If you do not have the right people providing service to your customers, then you will have quality issues. Quite simply, to gift your customers with the best cleaning, you need to hire the best people. I see this as a competitive advantage for Oakville Maids because we have had 20 years of experience in recruiting top-caliber cleaners.
First, we have a dedicated recruiter. This goes a long was in sorting through the quantity to find the quality. Hiring is a full time job and most house cleaning services treat it as part time because they simply do not have the resources to hire a full time recruiter. Fortunately, we do.
In addition to having the recruiting muscle, one of our secrets to finding quality housekeepers are to see their work BEFORE we hire them. One of the steps in our hiring process is the “Audition”. We hire the cleaner for just for one day to accompany one of our leading teams. From one day of work in field, we can see firsthand their cleaning prowess and potential so we know whether they will be able to provide the level of service our customers have come to expect at Oakville Maids.
In addition hiring the right people, having a proven standard operation procedures that have been field tested and refined over a period of two decades also solves any issues with Communication, Value of services, and Punctuality – we’ll cover that in the following sections.
Communication
It is not surprising that communication is a sore spot in some cleaning companies’ services. To offer our customers better communication, we offer multiple methods of communication for our customers to reach the staff of Oakville Maids. Methods such as calling us on our phone, phone sms, email, online forms, chat box on oakvillemaids.ca, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook. Though it’s not all about giving our customers multiple of ways to reach out to us, we need to reach back to them, too!
Our Quality Assurance Supervisor, Mary, listens to all call recordings ensuring that no one is missed. She prepares a list of people to call each morning, mostly for first time service quality checks and our occasional check up, but also for calls or online communication that may have been missed by our office staff. Fortunately, the latter rarely happens, though having Mary to ensure we always get back to our customers and no one is forgotten is one of Oakville Maids’ strengths.
Since Mary monitors all staff/customer interactions, nothing falls through the cracks. Ever had a maid service miss a to-do item or even an entire cleaning appointment? Yeah? That doesn’t happen at Oakville Maids.
Value
The value someone feels they have received in hiring a cleaning service does not come from the house cleaning alone. It is derived from the entire experience. From the initial call, the reminder email, the actually house cleaning, and follow communication to ensure the customers is 100% satisfied, the whole experience provides value for the customer. Harking back to what was written earlier: hiring the right people and having field tested, proven business systems fixes this issue as well.
Punctuality
Somethings are out of our control such as traffic jams, bad weather, a house that may have taken longer than expected, etc; all of these which may delay our cleaning team. At Oakville Maids, we provide our customers a two hour arrival window. Yes, we can often arrive at a more specific time however we understand somethings are out of our control and may delay our cleaning crews. Therefore, we do not promise an exact arrival time because we prefer not to make a promise we can’t always keep. We will make every effort to arrive within the arrival window – which we do 99% of the time – however we are determined not to break a promise with our clients, even if it may be for that 1%. Integrity matters to us.
Dishonest Customer Representative
This surprised us because it is an issue we haven’t come across. Having honest, friendly service staff to help answer customers questions, schedule their cleaning, overcome issues in field for them, etc. simply seemed so obvious that we assumed other companies would seek such integrity with their own representatives. At Oakville Maids, we have interview questions and personality surveys that are designed to reveal who the job candidate is deep within. Our customers entrust us with their biggest investment: their home! So, in the cleaning industry it is crucial to find staff with 1) a good work ethic and 2) a good heart. You cannot have one with out the other!
Conclusion
We’re glad we conducted this investigation in our competitors shortcomings because it is reassuring to know Oakville Maids is on top in terms of providing our customers with the most value in home cleaning. Ultimately, it all comes down to 1) knowing how to find, hire, and keep the right talent and 2) have a proven system, namely standard operation procedures which is vital for smooth operations and producing the same, quality results each and every time. And compared to the other cleaning services in Oakville, Ontario, Oakville Maids is mopping up the competition.