How to handle customer complaints in a commercial cleaning business

I ran a commercial cleaning company for a long time, and there is one phone call every owner gets sooner or later. A customer calls and says somebody threw up in the stairway, can you take care of it. That call tells you a lot. How your company handles it, in the next half hour, says more about you than anything in your proposal did, because the customer is watching to see whether you scramble or whether you have a way of doing it.

Here is how it should go. You open a ticket while the customer is still on the line, and the cleaner who is already on staff at that building gets it on their phone as a text with a link, with no app to open and no password to remember. They go to the stairway, disinfect it, clean it all up, and send back a photo of the clean stairs. Then you call the customer back and tell them it was fixed in twenty minutes. Nobody had to chase anybody.

The part I like best is what comes after. The cleaner writes back on the ticket that they are going to need more disinfectant, because they used the whole bottle on that stairway. That note stays. It sits on the record with the photo and the times, so six months later at renewal the complaint has become part of the proof that you looked after the building when it counted.

Step one: write down what they actually said

Take the complaint in the customer’s words. “The washrooms are bad” is a feeling, and you need a location. Ask which floor, which washroom, and what they saw, then write it down before you hang up, while the customer is still there to correct you if you got the floor or the side of the building wrong. A complaint you can point to on the site layout is one you can fix tonight and check tomorrow.

Rate how urgent it is while you have them. A spill, a bodily fluid or a blocked toilet is a health and safety call, and somebody goes now. A dusty ledge can wait. It goes on the next visit with a note to the crew, and the customer will usually tell you which kind of call it is if you ask them plainly how soon they need it.

Step two: send the fix, and get a photo

Whoever takes the call should be able to send the work. If the only way to dispatch a cleaner is to reach the owner on their cell, every complaint waits for the owner. I want the office manager, the supervisor or the owner to be able to open the ticket and send it, because the customer does not care who picks up.

Ask for a photo every time. A photo of the clean stairway is worth more than any apology, because it is the thing the customer can forward to their own boss. It ends arguments too. Nobody has to debate whether the work was done when there is a picture with a time on it sitting under the ticket, and I wrote about why that record matters in proof of service for commercial cleaning.

Step three: close the loop with the customer

Call or text them back the moment it is done. Send the photo. Most of the anger in a complaint comes from not knowing whether anybody heard, and a fast follow-up with the time it was fixed and a picture of the result takes care of most of it before they hang up. While you have them, ask if there is anything else, because there often is.

Step four: find the cause

Some complaints are one-offs. Somebody being sick in a stairway is nobody’s fault, and the only job is a fast response. Others are a miss in the regular clean, like a washroom that keeps running out of paper towel by two in the afternoon or a lobby floor that looks tired every Monday after the weekend. Those cost contracts. Fixing them only on the night they get reported tells the customer you wait to be told.

Once a week, read every complaint from every site. Look for patterns. The same building twice, the same area twice or the same crew twice means something in the regular clean is broken, so change something you can name, whether that is the checklist line, the frequency, the person or the training. Then put that area on the next inspection so you know the change held. The guide to inspection frequency covers how often to go back to a site that keeps getting calls.

The best complaint is the one you catch before the customer does. Supervisors who inspect and note what they find, in a daily supervisor report filed by site, find most of these misses first. When the customer does call, you can tell them you saw it on Tuesday and it is already being fixed.

What complaints are worth at renewal

Most owners treat complaints as bad news to forget. I keep them. At renewal, a customer remembers the two bad nights and forgets the hundred good ones, so I bring the record of every call, how fast we got there and what we changed afterwards. That turns the bad nights into evidence you are the company that shows up. I covered that conversation in how to keep cleaning clients, and the client satisfaction scorecard is a way to ask the customer directly before they call you.

That is how we built KleanProof. Anyone on the team can open a ticket from the customer’s call, the cleaner gets the fix by text with no login, and the photo and every note come back on the ticket under the site. When I want to know how a building has been treated since the spring, I open the site. Every call is there, with times and photos, and nobody has to remember anything.