TECHNOLOGY
OBSERVE AND REPORT
Rick Stoor, Managing Director of Templa, explains how business management software is helping cleaning companies deliver previously unachievable levels of client service.
In contract cleaning, client satisfaction is principally delivered through investment in staff training and the monitoring of cleaning standards. However, the added dimensions of an efficient helpdesk and a secure portal through which clients can view key contract information are now giving cleaning companies a vital extra edge in their efforts to retain contracts.
Standalone software packages may be able to deliver these benefits individually, but when the individual software applications form part of an integrated contract management system, it is definitely a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts – in other words when they each share data from a single centralised contracts database to deliver their benefits. The critical area of quality auditing is a good example where outdated or standalone systems are not making life easy for contractors.
Common Problems With
Quality Auditing Many cleaning company directors I speak to complain that their quality audit system is so inflexible as to be not worth the paper it’s written on – literally in some cases. Here are a few reasons why.
• The form itself, whether electronic or paper, is too rigid in its layout. For example, unless you are auditing
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a very small area of a large office building, how can you record a single score in a box entitled ‘toilets’ or ‘hard floors’?
• One building can contain several different accommodation types, for example an office, a manufacturing floor and a canteen. This makes it difficult to use the same audit sheet throughout the building as different areas may have different specifications.
• Clients will often place great importance on a feature of their building that is unique to their site. For example, a brass plate by the front entrance is the most important item to them, but where is that on your audit sheet?
• There is no flexibility in the scoring system. What if you want to have pass/fail instead of 1-5?
• There’s no way of checking whether audits have been done in line with the agreed frequency.
• There is no way of knowing what the scores are until the results are manually updated to a spreadsheet days or weeks after they are returned to the office. Even if the audits are done on a mobile device using a standalone package, the results may have to be physically emailed back to the office for manual analysis.
• To send the client the results of a month’s worth of audits means laboriously collating the data and emailing it, by which time the results are out of date anyway.
So how does integrated business management software rise to
this challenge? The answer is that the interaction of different modules in an integrated system can help achieve an all-round step change in your satisfaction ratings. The table below shows how the quality auditing module, as part of our TemplaCMS integrated contract management system, can drive enhanced levels of client satisfaction.
THE SET-UP When a contract is set up in the software’s Contracts module the following information is loaded in relation to the integrated Quality Audits module:
• The frequency of audits, for example weekly or monthly. This can include varying frequencies by site if it’s a multi-site contract with many buildings of differing size or importance.
• The type of scoring templates. For example a leisure centre can have a different scoring
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