How To Handle Complaints in the Strata Cleaning Business – Our Plan.

I am sure we could all trade stories of our customers and how they expressed their concerns to us. Unfortunately its the few negative interactions that overshadow the vast majority of positive ones. The most common issue we face this time of year is when a window gets missed during a building cleaning, which then gets blown out of proportion. One of the more humorous (and frustrating) examples is receiving a call on the first day of a two-week project that their window was missed.

So to avoid these issues, we’ve put together a point-by-point checklist of lessons learned over the past 25 years.

HOW WE HANDLE COMPLAINTS (CASES) FOR STRATA’S

Try and stop the complaints before they happen:

• The first step is clearly setting expectations before we start. Building notices are often our main way to communicate to residents: we try to be absolutely clear what we will do and not do, as well as what we need the residents to do.
• Have a dispute resolution process, including where and how to communicate issues. This leads us to….

Cutting out the middle man in the complaints:

• Having residents come to us directly speeds up the process and ensures that they get the answer straight from the service provider. Not only is it more efficient, it saves your inbox getting filled with complaints.

Notify all parties as to the current job status:

• Job Confirmation – Dates, scope of work, site notices.
• Reminder Email – Does a notice need posting? Window screens removed?
• En route – Site contacts know to be prepared for arrival.
• Job Completion – we’re done, check for any issues.

Defusing complaints by calling them cases and categorizing them into buckets based on their features:

• Customer Service – not really an issue but we return.
• Technical – Its a technical issue and we could have done better or simply missed something.
• Damage – We unfortunately damaged something and need to repair.

Preparing our customers knowledge by providing informative content like our blog site:

• Articles on the technical aspect of cleaning.
• Content outlining what clean looks like.