How to Train Cleaning Employees To Ensure Satisfied Clients
Employee training is a crucial aspect of running a cleaning business.
You need maids, cleaners, and housekeepers who can deliver excellent consistent results every time.
Great cleaning experiences lead to repeat business, long-term customers, and in the end significant profits to your bottom line.
It is hard to regain trust after a lousy cleaning experience, make consistency one of your top priorities.
Develop a training process to ensure the same excellent service with each cleaning appointment.
Here are some tips to consider in your training program.
Establish Standards of Cleanliness
Your staff will be measured by the quality of each of their cleaning jobs.
It is essential to define what a clean home looks and feels like. Don’t assume everybody on your team has the same standard of cleanliness because this often varies a lot from person to person.
You can give your staff a checklist of the tasks that they should do with each visit. This list can include things like vacuuming the floors, wiping down all the surfaces, and leaving a clean and empty sink. Anything that needs doing should be covered.
Make sure that your staff has ample time to ask any questions they may have about the cleanliness standard.
It is important to express that there are no dumb questions. Training is the best time to address confusion and establish best practices.
Teach Proper Use of the Equipment
What equipment will your staff need to use? They should know the ups and downs of every tool that will be a part of their cleaning arsenal.
Imagine that a member of your team is cleaning a kitchen when the vacuum stops working. The floor is a mess, and the client will be home in 20 minutes. This is the kind of scenario where knowing how the equipment works will make a big difference.
Your staff should understand basic troubleshooting for any devices that they are using. They should have replacement bags, rags, and so on.
This is how your team can be fully prepared for any situation that they come across.
Address and Retrain Common Mistakes
Doing a cleaning job well isn’t just about what to do. It is also about what not to do.
You want to minimize the amount of trial-and-error that happens on the job so that your customers can have a great experience.
What are the most common complaints that you have heard from past clients? Address these issues proactively at the beginning of training.
For example, a typical cleaning mistake is to miss dust and debris in hard-to-reach places. Your clients will be unhappy if they realize there’s a mess under the couch or in another easily missed spot.
This is where a checklist is essential again. Along with the basic tasks to do, you should include common errors on the list. Ask your employees to double check each one before leaving a job site.
It is all about consistancy
If you want customer retention for your cleaning business, you need to provide consistent service. This should not require the same maid to go to the same house each time. It is much easier to train your entire team to be as consistent as possible.
Emphasize the importance of following the company’s cleanliness standard every single time. Explain to your employees that it only takes one bad experience to turn customers away. What’s good for business, in this case, is also good for them.
The best way to encourage consistency is to have your employees communicate with each other. You can facilitate this is by having new maids shadow experienced employees on one or two jobs. They can see what a cleaning looks like with your company, which might not be the same as past jobs they have worked.
When your employees share their knowledge and experience with each other, the consistency of your service improves. This doubles as a way to boost morale at work. You are giving your employees a sense of authority by letting them help each other.
Customer Etiquette
There’s more to the job of being a maid than just cleaning. Every member of your staff needs to be an expert at talking to customers. It is important to have a polite and articulate staff that can treat people like VIPs if they are home during the appointment.
The job is easiest when the house is empty. This makes it easy to get everything clean and reduces the need for customer service. Nonetheless, there will always be times when people are home during a cleaning.
Role play basic customer experiences with your staff during the training process. Have them practice introducing themselves to customers and dealing with any awkward situations they might encounter. For example, teaching employees how to de-escalate when a customer gets upset can help increase your customer retention.
Use role-playing to train and reinforce
Whenever possible, give your team real experience before they go out into the field. There are a few ways to do this. If you have an office, you can bring in some spare furniture and intentionally make a mess for your new employees to practice cleaning on.
The advent of AirBnB has made for another interesting option. You can actually rent out a house and stage a mess with dirty dishes, tracking dirt into the house, and other mild messy behaviors. Then you can have your new employees do a test run of cleaning the house.
This is a simple way to create real experience without sending untrained employees to work at real homes. You can offer pointers based on how the employee does while still in training. This will circumvent those mistakes from happening on a real job.
Solicit feedback from your cleaning staff
After the training process is over, get feedback. This is an important step if you want to improve your training over time.
If you want the most honest feedback, make it anonymous. You can set up an anonymous questionnaire online. This is important if you are going to get real feedback that includes constructive criticisms of the process.
It is not enough to just collect feedback. You must actually act upon it, even when it is difficult. Make changes to your training process so that it will be even more effective with the next round of hires.
