August focus: Domestic Cleaning Service
Determining the Fee
The very first thing you will need to develop is your ability to handle the inquiries as and when they come in. The way you do this will determine how many of your inquiries turn into bookings. There are a few very simple techniques to follow in order to maximise the number of bookings you make from the marketing and promotions that you will do. If you follow these guidelines you will turn a high percentage of your inquiries into bookings. It will then be up to how well you do your work as to whether or not your client decides to let you clean regularly or not.
RULE 1: Firstly determine what level of service the caller needs or wants, and then estimate a fee for service based on this information.
RULE 2: Always ask questions before discussing your service with the client. If you waste your caller’s time telling them information that is not relevant to their needs or wants you are less likely to turn their inquiry into a booking. Take control of the call by asking any or all of the following questions:
“Are you inquiring about Regular cleaning, Spring-cleaning, Vacate cleaning or Window cleaning?”
In the event of an inquiry about Regular cleaning, the questions to ask are:
“Has your home been maintained with Regular cleaning up until now?”
If the answer to this question is no, then you can easily suggest a Spring-clean for the first service. If the answer is yes then you need to ask another set of questions to gain the information you now need.
“Have you been doing the work yourself, or has another cleaner been doing it for you?”
If another cleaner has been doing the work then ask the question:
“Were you happy with the standard of work being done by the other cleaner, and how long did it take them to do the work?”
If the client was happy with the standard of work by the other person, then just ask how many hours they were doing and this will give you the number of hours to base the estimate for the job on. If they were not happy with the standard of work you then need to determine if the other person’s work was of a poor quality or if the client has unreasonable expectations regarding what can be done in the time they are prepared to pay for. Sometimes nothing will be good enough for the client as they think that six hours work can be done in four. Don’t take on jobs like this.
If the client has been doing the work themselves there is a fairly high chance that the home will need a really good thorough clean because unless the client is a real fusspot their home will need a catch-up clean. You will only be able to determine this once you see the home. When you can see the home you can then suggest either a First Extended Maintenance clean or a full Spring-clean if need be.
Simply follow the pattern on the Booking Form that you’ll find in a later article this month. You could ask questions like:
‘How many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the home?’
‘Is your home single or double story?’
‘What type of floor coverings do you have?’ ie: carpet, lino, tiles, wooden floorboards etc.
‘Are your wardrobes Mirrored or Plain?’
‘Are there any rooms that you don’t want cleaned?’
‘Would you like your oven to be cleaned?’
‘Would you like your work to be done Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, or once only?’
RULE 3: Use what is known as an ‘assumptive close’ when dealing with your callers. Don’t ask them whether they would like to use the service. Instead ask which part of the week they would like their work to be done. Say ‘Would you like your work done at the start of the week or the end of the week, Mrs Jones?’
That way your callers will find themselves being booked into your schedule before they know it, and you can arrange to service them when you are available rather than when they want it done (within reason, of course). Always assume that your caller wants to go ahead with you anyway, so you don’t have to prove yourself to them in order to make the booking. If you have spent time asking the right questions and listening carefully to the clients’ response you are nearly always going to make a booking from the call, so approach the call as if it is yours even before you begin.
RULE 4: Never, never say to your client ‘How long do you think that it will take to do your cleaning?’ because given half a chance the client will always say that the cleaning will ‘only take 2 or 3 hours’, when in fact there is more like 4 to 6 hours work. Your client will assume that there are less hours involved than there really are, because having not been trained to do the work themselves they are often not aware of exactly how much work you actually have to do to get the job done.
If you ask questions that follow the pattern on the Booking form at the start of the article that you will find later in August that has to do with booking your jobs, then you will have all the information needed to estimate over the phone how long the booking will take. Then, once you are at the premises you can see for yourself whether the information that was given to you was correct or not. You can adjust your estimate accordingly then.