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Simple Reputation Management Strategy For Cleaning Businesses

How to optimize your reputation management strategy

Your cleaning business’s reputation online and offline can make or break your business. Unfortunately, your online reputation is much more easily accessible to potential customers, so you need to make sure you maintain it. In this post, you’ll learn a simple reputation management strategy for cleaning businesses to help maintain your positive image in the marketplace.

Provide good service

Now it may seem like common sense, but the foundation for improving your offline and online reputation is to provide good service. Positive word of mouth is going to be one of the best ways to promote your business and to get referrals.

In years past you may have been able to get away with shoddy service and still be able to grow a business but not anymore. Your reputation may have been spread quickly via word of mouth before, but now with brands being so visible online, news spreads even faster.

There are several aspects to providing quality service beyond just doing a good job cleaning. Your customer service matters, your responsiveness, ability to deal with customer complaints, and more.

Always strive to offer the best service possible and it will make your reputation management strategy much easier. It will be much easier to implement the strategies below if you have a foundation of quality service in your cleaning business.

Focus on good hiring practices

One way to help improve your chances of providing good service and maintaining your company’s positive reputation is by implementing good hiring practices. Some cleaning businesses will hire anyone who expresses any interest in taking a cleaning job, while others do more due diligence on potential hires.

The better screening process you have up front, the more likely you will hire quality employees that will stick around long term. There are several things to look for during your screening process beyond someone looking for a job.

For example, most people don’t necessarily think that candidates have to be a people person to be a house cleaner or custodian. They certainly may be able to clean just fine without being a people person, but they also act as the front line and face of your company for many customers.

If your cleaning technicians are friendly and at least relatively good with people, it can give your company a good name rather than harm your reputation with clients. Another key factor to look for when hiring is a clean background check.

Your clients are letting strangers into their homes or offices, and the last thing they want is someone in their home or office that they feel they can’t trust. By completing thorough background checks on potential employees as a part of your hiring process, you can use that fact to build trust with potential clients.

Put emphasis on employee training

Are your employees highly trained and efficient? Another great way to manage your cleaning company’s reputation is to have a staff that is well trained.

Having highly trained and efficient employees go hand in hand with providing good service. Are your production rates competitive with the market? If not that can be another hurdle to overcome in your reputation management strategy.

The better you can train your employees the more likely they will do a good job cleaning and not cause unintentional damage to a client’s property. If your cleaning technicians are not efficient or perform shoddy work, word will get around and you may lose clients to competitors.

It may take more time initially to train your staff, but it will pay off in return down the road. Many cleaning companies miss the little things and often they miss the little details.

It might seem like something customers may not notice but the little things add up. If you let training and quality service fall through the cracks it can lead to poor reviews and a bad reputation.

Ask for customer feedback

Do you ever survey your customers on what you could be doing better? Your existing cleaning clients can be a great place to determine how your services are being performed.

They can tell you what you are doing right and what you are struggling with. Your reputation management strategy should contain some kind of feedback gathering method from your customers.

By asking for customer feedback it can also help you improve other systems in your business. Is taking payment from clients a hassle? Are they frustrated with certain aspects of your cleaning services? Do your clients wish you provided certain kinds of other additional services?

All of these are questions you can find out by asking for ongoing customer feedback. If you are always striving to be the best cleaning services provider in your area you are sure to maintain a better reputation.

If your customers are ever unhappy with your services, or a cleaning technician, or any other issues, by asking for feedback often you can address these issues immediately. The longer negative issues go on without being addressed the more likely it can harm your company’s reputation offline and online.

Get positive reviews and highlight them in your reputation management strategy

A huge part of your reputation management strategy should be a focus on getting positive reviews for your business. There are so many benefits to having positive reviews and many ways to use them in conjunction with your marketing strategy. Plus, if you are frequently asking for customer feedback you can also ask for reviews when your clients have good things to say.

One benefit is that it provides social proof for your cleaning company. Most people don’t want to work with a company that is untested or that has a bad reputation.

By getting more positive reviews it makes your cleaning company more trustworthy. All things being equal, most people tend to do business with companies that they trust. Also, most people are likely to believe the overall review rating of your company as a reflection of your overall company quality, trustworthiness, and dependability.

When people are looking for cleaning companies to do business with online one of the first thing they will look at are your reviews. Making a focus on getting more and maintaining positive reviews is essential to your reputation management strategy.

Highlight positive reviews in your reputation management strategy

Use Google My Business in your reputation management strategy

Another part of your reputation management strategy should be to optimize your Google My Business page. You would be surprised at how many businesses either don’t have this set up or don’t have it optimized.

Almost any time someone searches using terms like “cleaning service near me” a Google My Business listing or Google Maps result will show up. If you want to have more people find your profile online, optimizing your Google My Business page should be one of the first steps.

When people aren’t able to find your business, it reflects poorly on your business. A Google My Business page also highlights your reviews and the more reviews you have the better it can rank in search as well.

This is yet another reason to make sure you have a reputation management strategy in place. A well-optimized Google My Business page with lots of reviews can be a resource of steady traffic for your business.

Ask for testimonial videos

In addition to written reviews, you might also consider asking for video reviews from your cleaning clients. Written reviews are powerful, but video reviews and testimonials can be even better.

It’s harder to fake a video testimonial and typically people expand on their reviews when they are in video form. These expanded testimonials also usually include your customer’s story.

Facts tell and stories sell. People will relate to your happy customer’s stories. New potential customers will likely work with you for the same reasons these past customers did.

Gathering these video testimonials can also improve your business reputation and can increase conversion rates for your business. A few good video testimonials can do wonders towards improving your reputation.

Automated review system

Now if trying to get all of these reviews from your clients sounds like a lot of work, thankfully there are some ways to automate this process. One method we recommend to our clients is a service called More Reviews Now.

With this system, you are able to add clients to your review request list and it automatically sends out follow up emails asking them to leave positive reviews for your cleaning business. This reputation management strategy can help you improve follow up and improve your online reputation by having more positive reviews.

Another way to automate this process is with an email autoresponder. Create a specific email series that asks for feedback on your services. This series should also request a reviews from clients as well.

You would likely need to manually add new clients to this follow-up series after their first service, but after that, the follow-up process would be automated.

Respond promptly to negative reviews to improve your reputation management strategy

Certainly, positive reviews can help your reputation management strategy, but how you handle negative reviews is just as important. Today’s consumer is savvier than ever. Most people realize that not everyone is going to be 100% pleased with your services.

Also, people are much more likely to leave a negative review on something trivial. Unfortunately, most people that experience great service never leave a review without you asking them to. To combat the negative reputation this can create for your cleaning business you need to respond to negative criticism promptly.

How you respond to negative reviews can usually fix things that would normally deter people from working with you. People are looking for you to respond promptly and attempt to fix the issue. Most people aren’t looking for perfection from your cleaning business, but more that you care about making things right.

Offer solutions to create a win-win situation for you and the unhappy client. Try and avoid getting overly defensive and instead, simply do what you can to offer a solution. Also, explain the situation if there is a misunderstanding. Then cover the appropriate steps that can be done to remedy the issue.

When potential clients see that this is how you handle your negative criticism, they will be more likely to hire you even with a few bad reviews.

Conclusion

Many cleaning businesses neglect to create a reputation management strategy and that is something you can not afford to do. How you handle your reputation plays a big role in attracting and maintaining your customer base.

Start with a foundation of providing good service along with hiring and training quality employees that do their job efficiently. You then want to focus on asking for and getting more positive reviews for your business.

Make sure to use these reviews as part of your off-site SEO strategy by optimizing your Google My Business page. It is one of the first places people will see to determine if you are a reputable company worth hiring.

Utilize automated tools as a part of your reputation management strategy to streamline the process of improving your reputation. Also, be sure to treat negative reviews as important as positive reviews, and respond to issues quickly.

With these processes in place, you will be well on your way to creating a quality reputation offline and online for your cleaning business.

P.S. If you are struggling to get quality leads for your cleaning business, Click Here to Learn How to Get More Clients for your business with these Top 10 Lead Sources For Cleaning Business Owners.