The Maids San Diego Cleaning Blog

When Will My Cleaning Service Arrive – A San Diego Story

Tweet  

  

  

  

 delicious  

  

We've recently been hearing many requests for very small arrival windows for our cleaning service teams.  I've been trying to understand how this expectation has been created in the home cleaning industry where it doesn't seem to appear in others.

flickr credit:  The Artifex

I should preface the main content of this post by saying that we maintain hundreds of keys in key lock boxes.  We're fully insured and have a numbering system in place to separate the address of the key from the key itself.  The window of arrival generally applies to those that for one reason or another want to meet their house cleaning team at their home.

flickr credit:  ndanger

We create routes for our cleaning teams on the previous day.  We'd create the routes earlier, but we understand that our customers' lives change frequently and that there will be any number of cancellations/changes up until the morning of our visit.

Once the schedule has been created, we make reminder calls to our customers.  This is the interesting part.  Many times we get one of two responses:

• "You always come exactly at x:xx o'clock."
• "A two hour window? It should be 15 minutes."

flickr credit:  jessicafm

Please realize that we hate arguing with customers.  Truth be told, those that believe that we've always shown up at a specific time are wrong.  We keep records to the minute of previous visits and can see the different times at which we've arrived.  It's interesting how perception can make one right - I'm scared to ask my wife where I've made this error!

The second bullet is confusing to me.  Some other owners and I were discussing this the other day and could not think of a service industry that gives a 15 minute window of arrival to your home (unless it's the first visit).  The math is clear - some days go faster and other days go slower.  It's the sum of these faster and slower times that create the window.  While we continue to improve our estimates, I'm not sure how one can make a point estimate when traffic and other customers can dramatically affect our schedule.