Colorado home cleaning business, All Star Cleaning, has cut its customer attrition rate in half in just 2 months by introducing a new way of monitoring whether its customers are happy.
All Star Cleaning Services, Fort Collins, CO, has 150 customers and 12 employees. Its founder, Laura Smith, says that her company was struggling to grow at the rate she knew it could because of one of the cleaning industry’s major issues – customer attrition.
Laura said “Customer attrition is the problem all cleaning companies want to solve. It makes a huge difference in your growth rate. Typically 7-10% per month (of customers) would turn over. Over the last 17 months I figured I had lost 148 clients, almost my whole base. The challenge we have in this industry is that all of the staff come into the office in the morning and then they leave. It’s not like a retail business – the majority of the work is being performed elsewhere. That is why it’s hard to keep quality under control at times and why there is a lot of client turnover.”
All Star Cleaning had tried for years to get reliable customer feedback. “We were using comment cards, which we were leaving behind after each cleaning. It was a flawed system. The cleaners did not bring back all of them and we did not have a really great response rate. We would leave out 15-20 a day and I would see 2 a day come back. I used to feel like I sometimes I had to beat my clients over the head to tell us how they feel. They don’t want to be bothered, they definitely don’t want to do long surveys and they don’t want to have to return my phone call.”
After being recommended a low-cost online tool for solving this issue, Laura decided to test Customer Thermometer. Customer Thermometer allows companies to create beautiful, branded emails with feedback buttons embedded – no coding or design skills required. Customers click one button and their responses are tracked in real-time on the online dashboard.
All Star Cleaning has been delighted with the results they’ve seen so far. Founder Laura said “We’ve been doing this for almost 2 months, and we cut our attrition rate in half almost immediately. Our customers are just not leaving anymore. It’s been phenomenal. The staff love it. They love the immediate feedback – they compete to see who can get the most gold star responses. My staff took ownership of this on their own and they do the follow up on their own, I don’t have to push them into it. We send our blasts out daily. Our customers are blown away by how quickly we respond and solve their problem. I feel like it’s built a lot of loyalty for us.”
About Customer Thermometer
www.customerthermometer.com is a pay-as-you go online software service which allows businesses to create and send branded 1-click customer satisfaction emails. Customers click a single button to tell the sender how they feel about the service they have received. All clicks are uniquely tracked, meaning businesses can see in real-time who is happy and who is not. Response rates are typically higher than traditional online surveys because the emails take seconds to respond to, and work on smartphones and tablets as well as PCs and MACs.
Contact: lindsay@customerthermometer.com
All Star Cleaning Services http://www.cleaningallstars.com/
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We use Schedulicity.com for all of our scheduling. We find it extremely helpful as it has an email/newsletter/special offer marketing tool that allows us to do the same thing pretty painlessly and we only have to pay for one system. I love it but then I’ve never used anything else.
Posted by Larry Rickman | March 13, 2012, 1:26 pm