😥 Customer Feedback Hurting Your Cleaning Employees? What to do About It...

This is something we rarely think about when we're small and only have a handful of clients and cleaners.

When I started my cleaning business 16 years ago, we didn't care much about hurting an employee with customer feedback, which can be very offensive at times. I wanted to still provide my employee some feedback without disclosing everything, to keep them from getting their feelings hurt. House cleaning is a hard job and the last thing we want is to discourage employees from going into customers' houses.

I tried speaking to my dispatching software, and asked if there was a way to send filtered feedback to my employees, but they didn't care about this (they received too many features requests.) This is one of the main problems I've noticed with scheduling software - that they only care about scheduling/dispatching, and not employee management.

I put my head to work and told my team to build a solution that would:

1. Allow me to send feedback easily to my cleaning techs via text message.
2. Allow me to upload photos of the home, otherwise the employee might not remember which house we were talking about.
3. Be easy for my office staff to keep updated and be aware of the customer complaints. When there's too much automation, office staff and sales teams forget to pay attention to problems for the management team to solve.

Pipehire's Complaint Tracker is easy to use and implement. Here's how to do it.

Step 1: Quick select of the employee and customer: A preloaded list of employees and customers to eliminate data entry.

Step 2: Pick a category of the complaint and zip code: This will allow you to see a future-complaints analysis report (coming in 2021) to spot problems in your company and be able to do retraining. Entering zip codes will show you problematic zip codes in your city so you can avoid marketing there.

Step 3: Enter the complaint: Enter here the actual feedback provided by the client.

Step 4: Check a box if the field manager checked the job: This is important so you can tell if your field manager is doing his/her job.

Step 5: Did this complaint generate a negative review?: You want to track whether these complaints are generating negative reviews on Yelp or Google, so you can measure the impact on your business.

Step 6 and 7: Status of employee and customer resolution. This is a way to have a status of resolution with the customer as well as the cleaner. If you don't close a complaint properly, it could bite you in the backside, as it happened to me with a flooded house. So, make sure you track and close all complaints. A good cleaning service will make sure their clients are truly satisfied, not only when things are going well but when there are issues to solve.

Step 8: Only save or be able to send a text message to the employee quickly.  

Only Save: Will only save the entry for the owner or manager of the company. The employee will never be notified about this.

Save and Send SMS to Employee: The entry will be saved in the employee record and the employee also will receive a text message with the following info:

• Date of compliment
• Name of the client
• Reason
• Description of the compliment

Step 9: Enter a Complaints Score (1 to 5)

The complaints have a score too, 1 being a Light Complaint, such as, "they forgot to clean a mirror" and 5 being a Hard Complaint, like, "they almost killed my dog," or "they flooded my house," or something extreme.

We use these scores to feed the leaderboard that rates your employees from 1 to 5, 5 being the best.

How to Avoid Hurting Employee Morale

The little checkbox (see image below): If you uncheck the box, the employee will not see the description or full text of the complaint. We built this because we needed to let the employee know about the compliment/complaint without hurting their feelings. Being able to block the copy from the client if we want to protect the cleaner's feelings is the key to avoiding discouraged employees.

However, if the employee needs to be let go due to constant performance issues, they'll be able to read all their feedback if they wish.

Watch the video:

https://youtu.be/PB-69AE_Puc