WHAT'S YOUR POLICY?

You finally closed the deal and have established a startup date. You shake hands with the new customer and tell them, "If you ever have any problems, just give me a call". Is that the policy you follow in starting up a new account?

If that was the comment to me as a customer I would probably say something like, "I hired you to take care of the problems. The reason I called you and allowed you to present a proposal is that I don't want any more problems. If I want to have problems I'll hire my own staff or stay with my current vendor".

Now you are probably saying that you wouldn't do that but a vast majority of BSC's say exactly that or something similar to their customers every day. In effect those contractors are expecting their customers to find the problem areas and call them. If that is the policy then the customer should probably receive a quality assurance fee for doing the work we are being paid to do. Agree?

I have talked with many (and I mean many) contractors down through the years who have told me of accounts they lost and just couldn't understand why. There comment usually went something like "I don't understand, every time they called with a problem, I took care of it right away". They never did understand that that should have a quality assurance program in place where the customer doesn't have to call. And if you have a quality assurance policy in place and the customer still is constantly having to call, maybe you need a new policy or new people executing the policy.

Many years ago, I heard Tom Peters, one of the pioneers in customer satisfaction and customer relations make the statement that if you had to have a qualty assurance/customer relations department in your company, what are the rest of your people doing? After hearing that profound statement, I went home and changed our entire policy. He was right. His philosophy is that EVERYONE in the company should be totally focused on providing quality performance and customer satisfaction. That includes every cleaner, supervisor, manager etc. If the cleaner has been taught how to do the work correctly and does a check on their own work each time they complete the shift, should you really need someone to go from account to account during the day to check the work?

Let's see, you have the cleaning technician, the project supervisor, the area supervisor, the operations manager to assure quality work and you still need a inspector? Wow! That is one of the reasons why there should not be the need for us to tell the customer "if you have a problem, just give us a call". If they have to give us a call, we have had several layers of management miss something that the customer deemed important. Make sense?

I also realize that we are all human and WE WILL MAKE MISTAKES and miss important things from time to time. The key here is that we should have the policy in place so the customer is not our QA person. Our comment to the customer went something like this, "Thank you for your business, we are excited to have you on board. With our procedures and policies, it is our intent to perform at the highest level so you can perform at your highest level. We also know that people are human and mistakes can be made. In the event that should happen, you can be assured we will do our best to handle it in the fastest and least troublesome way". We just did not want our customer to expect there to be problems to report. Did we ever screw up? Absolutely, but without a company wide policy embedded in every employee's mind, the screw ups would have been far more frequent and more severe.

So, what about you? What's your policy? Do you wait for the customer to call or are you proactive with a procedure and policy in place that everyone in the company understands that will minimize the mistakes?
Is self inspection of work part of your cleaning technicians training? Do you teach total customer satisfaction? Do your employees know how to respond when a customer approaches them on the job? Do they know what they should say or not say to that valuable customer?

Let me know what you think or what your policy is. Your comments are always welcome. We even reread the comments we like.

Don't forget to register for the upcoming BSCAI/ISSA conventions and trade show coming in Las Vegas, NV. the week of November 17. Make your hotel reservations now so you are not left out. It promises to be a great week.

Till next time. By the way, we are adding new DVDs and CDs to our company store on a continuing basis. Check it out. MAKE IT A GREAT WEEK.