What To Do When You Lose A Cleaning Client Because Of Poor Performance

Jean Hanson

All cleaning businesses lose clients and for various reasons. In many cases it has nothing to do with your performance -- they could have gone out of business, or they could have hired a new property manager that has another cleaning company he likes working with. But if you lost the client because of poor performance, then you need to figure out what went wrong and how to keep the same thing from happening with other clients.

If you lost the client due to the economy there's not much you can do; but try to figure out if that's the REAL reason you lost the account. These days, it's easy for people to blame the economy rather than dealing with a problem. If it WAS due to the economy, is there anything you could have done to save the account by reducing services, etc?

If you uncovered a problem within your company that caused the loss, then you need to deal with it right away. If you lost the account due to poor service, review all your documentation on service issues with the account. If there is no documentation, why? If you aren't tracking phone calls and emails received from clients, then you are missing a huge opportunity to track possible performance issues.

If you have documentation, how were service concerns being handled? Was it a problem with one employee? If so, check the employee's personnel file to see if there was any documentation about the issue. Did the supervisor take care of client concerns by telling someone to take care of it and then never following up to make sure it was resolved? In this case, it's a supervisor issue.

Check with the supervisor and employees working in the building. What was their experience with the client? Did they communicate directly with the cleaners instead of reporting problems to supervisors or management? Sometimes cleaners don't have the same sense of ownership in their job as supervisors or management, so if they didn't take care of the customer request right away, it probably never happened.

After digging into what happened, discuss it in your management meeting to see what you can do to avoid this in the future. If you uncover a problem with a specific employee or employees, make it a point to check out all other buildings they clean. Chances are, if there was a problem in one building, there's a problem in the other buildings they clean.

It's never fun to lose a client, but it's even worse if you don't learn anything from the loss. If you lost the client due to your own poor performance, then it's time to step up and make sure you're taking care of the rest of your clients the way you promised when you took them on as a new client.

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Copyright TheJanitorialStore.com. All Rights Reserved. Jean Hanson helps owners of commercial cleaning companies build a more profitable and successful cleaning business through her online community at TheJanitorialStore.com. Jean is also the host of the popular Web TV show CleaningBiz.tv and author of the newsletter Trash Talk - sign up today!