MaidBossPro Blog — Running a Cleaning Business

The Customer App: A Place for Cleaning Business Clients to Pay, Request and Refer

Every cleaning company owner knows the steady trickle of customer questions. When are you coming today? Can I add the fridge next time? What do I owe? Can I update my card? Each one takes a minute to answer, and together they fill the office's day. A customer app gives customers a place to find those answers on their own, any time, without waiting for a reply.

Built on Ratings and Referrals

Reviews and Referrals for a Cleaning Business: Asking at the Right Moment mentioned that customers can rate visits and refer friends from the customer app. Those are two of the things it does. This article walks through the rest, from the customer's side and from the owner's.

Where the Team Is Today

The question customers ask most on cleaning day is when the team will arrive. The customer app answers it with a live map of today's route and a plain-language status: “You're stop 12 of 20 — the crew is 5 stops away.”

Customers who work from home can plan a call around the vacuum. Customers with pets know when to put the dog in the yard. Customers who want to be out of the house can leave at the right time. And the office phone rings less.

Alert preferences live in the app too. Customers choose the messages they want: the night before, when they're next, and when the team arrives. Those alerts are covered in Customer Communication for a Cleaning Business: Reminders, Texts and Day-Of Updates.

Requests and Sign-Ups

Recurring customers often want a little more now and then: a deep clean before the holidays, a move-out clean for a rental, an extra like inside the oven or interior windows. In the customer app, customers can request service and sign up for services and pricing you offer.

For the owner, that is extra work arriving without a phone call. Requests land with the office, which schedules them like any other job. Because the customer's home is already on file, the new job fills in from that home's last job, with the beds, baths, pets and entry notes ready to go.

Invoices, Payments and Cards

Money questions are the most awkward ones to answer by text. The customer app takes most of them off the table:

• See invoices. Every invoice, with its line items, in one place.
• Pay online. Customers who aren't on auto-charge can pay from their phone.
• Update their card. When a card expires or is replaced, the customer updates it themselves.

That last one matters more than it looks. A declined card is one of the most common profit leaks in a cleaning company, and the easiest fix is letting the customer update it without a phone call. More on that in Declined Cards and Lockouts: Protecting Cleaning Business Revenue on the Day of the Visit.

Before-and-After Photos

When the owner turns them on, customers can see before-and-after photos on their past visits. For a customer who was out during the clean, it is a nice look at what the team did. For a first-time deep clean or a move-out, it shows the difference clearly. And for a customer who is not sure whether the guest bathroom was cleaned, the answer is right there.

Whether to show photos is up to you. Some owners show them for every visit. Some prefer to keep them as an internal record. Either way, the team takes them in the same team app on every job.

Rating and Referring

The customer app gives customers a simple way to rate visits and refer friends and neighbors. Ratings give the owner a quick read on how each visit went, often before a problem turns into a cancellation. Referrals bring in new customers who already trust you, often from the same neighborhood.

Check ratings weekly. A run of high ratings from one team is worth telling that team about. A low rating is worth a personal follow-up the same day.

Introducing the App to Customers

Customers only use the app if they know it exists. A few easy ways to introduce it:

• Mention it in the welcome message when someone becomes a client.
• Point to it when customers text asking when the team will arrive.
• Suggest it when a card declines: “You can update your card in the app.”
• Remind recurring customers that they can request a deep clean there.

Every customer who uses the app is a customer who texts the office a little less, pays a little faster and finds it a little easier to stay. For more guides on running a cleaning company, visit the MaidBossPro cleaning business software page.