How Do You Manage Cleaners? - A Sparkling Clean For 2023
Learn how to effectively manage your cleaning team. From setting expectations to implementing training programs, here's a few key components of successful service management for cleaners.
Shoaib Ahmed
5 min
May 31, 2023
Cleaning Service
How Do You Manage Cleaners? - A Sparkling Clean For 2023
Shoaib Ahmed
May 31, 2023
What’s On This Page?
What is field service management for Cleaning Services companies?
What impact does field service management have on Cleaning Services?
What are the best practices for managing a cleaning business?
What are the best ways to train your cleaning employees?
Choose a good FSM solution for your cleaning service business
Closing thoughts
What Is Field Service Management For Cleaning Service Companies?
Field service management involves the use of systems and processes to manage and coordinate field teams in a company. The software used for this purpose helps businesses optimize and streamline the management of their technicians, both in the field and in the office, by providing efficient solutions for organizing and deploying the teams.
We like to use this example a lot: Imagine that you have a team of field technicians, but you don't know how work is being completed. You may have questions about how to measure key performance indicators, what important information you should be tracking, and whether a particular spare part is necessary for a specific service.
You may also be unsure of the whereabouts of your technicians. A field service management software can help address all of these issues for your cleaning and maintenance business.
What Impact Does Field Service Management Have On Cleaning Services?
Cleaning work often involves a variety of tasks and skills, including the cleaning of walls, ceilings, windows, doors, fans, and furniture. It may also involve vacuuming sofas, cushions, carpets, and curtains, as well as the removal of tough oil and grease from tiles, stoves, slabs, sinks, exhausts, and windows.
Cleaning tasks may also include the removal of utensils from cabinets, cleaning them from the inside, and placing them back. This can make it one of the most complex job and service types due to the various elements and specialized skills required.
Add to this a few more important business tasks:
Your existing CRM
Integration with your sales monitoring applications
Equipment tracking and management
Follow-up sessions with prospects
Invoice creation on the spot
Complicated enough? We haven’t even started accounting for customer ticketing and feedback solutions.
This is why having a field service management solution is critical for your business, especially if you have a professional cleaning team.
In this article we are going to help you understand how to manage your cleaning professionals better, what tools can help you achieve this, and help you decide on which FSM solutions can help a case as unique as your business.
What Are The Best Practices For Managing A Cleaning Business?
To effectively manage a cleaning business, it is necessary to keep track of the field teams and ensure that they are working efficiently and effectively. This involves monitoring their productivity and ensuring that they are delivering the desired results. It is also important to have visibility into where each team member is working at any given time.
Let’s take a look at how you can achieve these goals for your cleaning business as effectively as possible.
1. Teach Your Team To Leverage Their Time
To optimize your efforts, you should assess where you spend the most time and consider whether that is the best use of your resources. It may be possible to streamline your workload by automating routine, time-consuming tasks with appropriate software.
2. Make Better Informed Sales Decisions
Having the right tools can greatly simplify tasks such as scheduling and payroll, allowing you to redirect your attention to the development and expansion of your business rather than its daily operations.
3. Handle Cleaning Orders Before they Arise
Ugh, to contact your service provider every time there’s an issue with your building’s cleaning services system, only to have them juggle you around for a few days before actually sending a cleaner over to take a look. What if we said it’s easier for you? Because it really is. For commercial building managers, that’s the actual nightmare. It’s not one plumbing system that breaks down, it’s one hundred!
Implementing a preventative maintenance plan can help you maintain regular contact with your customers and ensure that their service equipment is checked up on a regular basis, rather than going for long periods without maintenance and risking major failures.
By incorporating preventative maintenance into your field service management system, you can improve customer satisfaction, balance your workflow and cash flow, and avoid the possibility of receiving panicked calls from customers about equipment failure
A field service management solution can also allow you to schedule service technicians to visit customer sites and proactively maintain cleaning services equipment before issues arise.
If you prioritize preventative maintenance in your field service business, it's worth considering software options that offer automated reminder systems, such as SMS or email notifications, to help you remind your customers to schedule service appointments. Something like Fieldproxy
This can help ensure that cleaning services equipment is serviced regularly and potential issues are addressed before they become major problems. Automated reminders can save time and effort for your business and improve the customer experience by making it easy for customers to stay on top of their maintenance needs.
4. Giving Individuals Responsibility
By using field service management software, you can improve your team's efficiency and productivity by keeping track of their work orders, monitoring their progress, and creating an audit trail of completed tasks. This can provide a more accurate record of the hours worked by your team, and allow you to identify team members who are performing well and those who may need additional support.
By using tech solutions consistently, technicians can more easily understand job instructions and access necessary job information, reducing issues that can arise from handwritten reports that are hard to read or misplaced paperwork.
A field service management software allows you to capture and manage information in real time through a mobile app, enabling the office to promptly move on to the next steps in the workflow, such as ordering parts, scheduling follow-up visits, reviewing reports for quality, or issuing invoices. This helps to streamline operations and improve efficiency.
A field service management (FSM) solution can help streamline processes and accelerate the invoicing process. It also allows you to more quickly respond to customer quotes and requests.
By using the FSM's mobile app, you can capture and manage information in real time, enabling the office to promptly move on to tasks such as ordering parts, scheduling follow-up visits, reviewing reports for quality, or issuing invoices. This helps to improve efficiency and streamline operations.
5. Build Better Customer-Centered Services
An FSM solution can help to make processes more efficient and speed up the invoicing process. It can also enable quicker responses to customer requests and quotes.
The FSM's mobile app allows for the real-time capture and management of information, enabling the office to quickly move on to tasks such as ordering parts, scheduling follow-up visits, reviewing reports, or issuing invoices.
Using the FSM solution can help to streamline operations and improve efficiency.
6. Take Care Of Payment Issues Before Anything
Maintaining a stable cash flow is essential to the success of any business, and it can be difficult to do so consistently, especially in a field service business with many moving parts.
Field service management software can assist in the management of service, emergency, and preventative maintenance work, leading to a more balanced cash flow and smoother operations overall.
It is important to consider all costs, including payroll for field technicians, when setting budgets and tracking project expenses. By using automation solutions to track all team expenses in one place, you can quickly identify when costs are starting to exceed expectations and take action to address the issue before it becomes a problem.
Neglecting to properly manage cash flow can have serious consequences, including the risk of bankruptcy, so it is important to stay on top of this aspect of your business from the outset.
7. Monitoring Your Cleaning Professionals
Tracking the timesheets of your team while they are out in the field is an important but potentially time-consuming task. Field service management software can make it easier by providing features such as live location tracking and a start/stop working button on a mobile app.
This allows technicians to log their own hours, providing accountability and helping you accurately forecast their utilization. Capturing accurate timelines also helps to ensure that the right hours are tracked and included in project costs, providing valuable insights on task duration and staffing needs.
This data can be useful for quoting and invoicing, as it helps to accurately reflect the amount of work completed and its impact on cash flow and profit.
While it is possible to manage cleaning service professionals using a whiteboard or paper-based system, it can be much more time-consuming and cumbersome than using field service management software. There are many elements to track and coordinate, so it is important to find ways to streamline processes and simplify your workload.
Field service automation solutions can help by providing a systematic, automated approach to managing your mobile workforce. By using FSM solutions, you can eliminate the need for spreadsheets, diaries, and large amounts of paperwork, making your job easier and more efficient.
What Are The Best Ways To Train Your Cleaning Employees?
Have A Proper Operation Regiment
A crucial first step in managing your cleaning business is to create a standard operating procedure (SOP) for each cleaning service you offer. These SOPs should provide your employees with step-by-step instructions for various tasks, ensuring that they are able to consistently deliver high-quality services.
Different types of services - like residential cleaners vs commercial cleaners vs carpet cleaners - everyone has a different working regiment, and you need to acknowledge that fact and act accordingly. Set proper regiments for your team and they will follow them.
Have Step-By-Step Procedures
To further improve the efficiency and consistency of your cleaning services, you can use forms and checklists to help your cleaners follow instructions, manage their time, and remember everything they need to do.
This will help to keep your services consistent and your clients satisfied. For instance, work completion forms can help cleaners get client approval for visits, provide evidence of work, and maintain detailed and accurate records of job information.
You can also provide your teams with cleaning checklists, which are itemized to-do lists for each process that give new employees the knowledge and confidence to do the job properly.
Handholding Helps
To ensure that your cleaners are properly trained and prepared to deliver high-quality services, it is important to plan your cleaning service training schedule in advance. This will allow cleaners to know what tasks they will be learning and when.
To avoid overwhelming new hires, you may want to schedule training for one service or discipline per day. It is usually best to start with the basics, such as how to clean different surfaces (e.g., porcelain, tile, glass).
For residential cleaners, a good place to start is the bathroom, as it has a variety of surfaces. From there, you can move on to more complex tasks, such as kitchen cleaning, dusting, spot cleaning, and vacuuming.
Nothing Beats On-The-Job Training
To maintain strong relationships with clients and keep them coming back, it is important to create a sense of trust between your cleaners and your clients. Your cleaners can help to build this trust by developing their people skills, such as clear communication and conflict resolution. This will help them to get along with your clients and with each other.
To start building relationships, introduce the new cleaner to the client whose house they will be cleaning. Once they know each other's names and faces, they will feel more comfortable and the relationship can begin to develop. To maintain the relationship, teach your cleaners to be respectful at all times.
Your team should never criticize a client or their home, no matter what the situation. You can also empower your cleaners to delight your clients with discounts or service upgrades, which can help to create happy clients who will refer their friends and leave positive reviews for your business.
What Can FSM Do As A Software For Cleaning Services?
Having a field service management software can streamline your business operations by allowing you to access all the necessary information in one central location. This eliminates the need for collating paperwork and reduces the risk of losing important documents. By implementing such a system, you can take a step closer to achieving your business goals.
Optimizing your field service business involves two main considerations: mapping out your desired workflow and implementing a system that leverages the latest technology. With a field service management software, you can capture real-time data in the field, saving time and reducing errors for both technicians and office staff.
This data can then be used to easily generate reports, such as test reports, SWMS, and service reports, reducing the time spent on administrative tasks compared to using a paper-based system.
By analyzing the performance of your team at a glance, you can increase customer satisfaction and success with your mobile workforce.
How To Choose A Good FSM Solution For Your Cleaning Services Business
To determine if a software solution is suitable for your cleaning service company, it is essential to understand your organization's processes and identify your top priorities.
Instead of simply selecting the first software you come across, it is important to find a solution that is flexible and able to adapt to the specific needs of your business.
Keep in mind that every business is unique, so it is essential to find software that can be customized to fit the particularities of your field service company.
Here are a few key factors to consider when choosing the right software for your cleaning service business:
Scheduling Cleaning Tasks Automatically
An cleaning services field services automation software can help field managers streamline their workload by allowing them to easily create service schedules based on the location, priority, and availability of their technicians.
This can effectively reduce the burden on field managers by making it easier for them to organize and coordinate their team's activities.
Advanced Cleaning Employee Location Monitoring
An effective cleaning services project management software should have advanced tracking capabilities that allow the field manager to optimize the service route and locate technicians for maximum efficiency.
This technology should enable the field manager to effectively manage and coordinate all aspects of any technical cleaning services project.
Detailed Insight Into Customer Requests And Cleaning Jobs
A reliable service automation software should include customer management tools that help teams improve their understanding of their customers, facilitating better communication and the establishment of trusting relationships.
By being able to access a client's complete details and insights into common issues, teams can more easily plan and implement strategies tailored to individual customers, leading to improved service overall.
These tools can be particularly valuable in the field service industry, where building strong relationships with customers is crucial for success.
Track And Collect Payments
A good cleaning services service and scheduling management software should allow field technicians to create straightforward invoices in order to streamline the accounting and payment process.
This can improve efficiency and reduce the workload for both technicians and the accounting team.
Collect Client Requests And Feedback
A field service management tool should offer good customer support to be effective. This should include features such as customized views of appointment windows, services being provided, and payment arrangements for cleaning services sector customers.
Additionally, customers should be able to easily submit service inquiries using an online request form to ensure that they receive the support they need and have easy access to necessary information.
LIVE Data Dashboards
Cleaning service managers should be able to filter agent metrics according to their specific needs and view performance in a convenient dashboard. A good system should also automatically generate reports, saving time and reducing the burden of tedious tasks.
It is essential to find a system that streamlines processes and makes your job easier, as this can help you focus on other important tasks and increase success.
How Fieldproxy Can Help Your Cleaning Services Service Business
Fieldproxy is an all-in-one field service management software for cleaning service businesses that can help your cleaning professionals breeze through all of their field operations. This feature-rich software product is designed to assist managers in various industries, including cleaning services, ISPs, electrical equipment manufacturers, and HVAC service businesses, in collecting data in a more organized format.
Fieldproxy allows managers to easily create automated workflows for their employees and assign tasks to agents through the web dashboard. The user-friendly mobile app enables field agents to update tasks as they are completed and provides real-time updates to managers.
The software also includes special workflows designed to ensure the safety and security of on-site field agents. During the pandemic, these features were especially useful for tracking contact, hygiene compliance, and accountability.
Fieldproxy’s feature-rich cloud-based application brings all your field tasks under one roof with the most interactive web application and highly capable mobile app. The heavy-duty software provides ample features like:
