More than The Maids
By Bill Yurgen
We’ve all been there at one time or another—most likely more often than we care to think about. You’re having problems with a product and you’ve become frustrated, attempting to resolve the issue on your own. You make a last ditch effort to get the problem fixed with a call to customer service. Within seconds of enduring the wretched and meaningless, “this call may be monitored for quality control purposes,” notice and the new but never-the-less ironic invitation to take a “brief” customer experience survey at the end of your call, you are transferred to a seemingly unending period of voice-prompting purgatory.
Many minutes later, you finally reach a human being only to find within seconds that your efforts are doomed because that person could not care less about your troubles. Your mission is to have your problem solved. Their mission is to make it through their day with a minimum of intrusion by people like us, the customer.
Arrggh!
Jim C. and his wife, Joyce, used to have such problems with their cleaning company.
“Several years ago, before we hired The Maids, we employed a cleaning company with an owner who had poor customer service skills,” Jim says.
“I founded a family-owned business that requires frequent, unexpected travel. We have grown children and grandchildren who are spread out geographically and that situation as well calls for making unplanned trips. We would call the previous service and ask them to move cleaning dates to work around our changing schedule, but soon learned they expected us to work around their schedule.”
“It actually got to a point where the previous service was expecting us to pay for the missed cleaning days when we had to cancel, and they wouldn’t accommodate us with a rescheduled cleaning date,” Joyce adds.
The situation finally came to a head when the couple received a letter from the cleaning service owner detailing what their “etched in stone” cleaning schedule would be—and that they would be billed for those dates, regardless.
Jim, as a business owner, knows a thing or two about the order of things—customer first, service provider second. Jim promptly called the man and told him that he and Joyce were done with the man’s company, only to be greeted by indifference.
“That was in 2013. We hired The Maids immediately afterward and haven’t had a customer service issue since,” Jim says.
A few years ago, the couple’s cleaning appointment fell on a winter day, when storms were making road travel hazardous, Joyce recalls.
“The Maids’ scheduled cleaning time was in the afternoon and they called us well before the time window they were supposed to arrive to let us know they were having weather-related travel problems and were running off schedule,” she says.
“They told us they could make it in the very late afternoon or early evening. We told them to get home to their families and be sure to drive safely. They are always so friendly, pleasant and extremely reliable.”
What Jim and Joyce are most enthusiastic about is the company’s flexibility.
“Our home is quite large, so we have them clean our first floor and just do our master bedroom upstairs since the other bedrooms are only used when we have visitors,” she says.
“It takes our ‘pink team’ about an hour-and-a-half to do a regular clean. When our children and grandchildren are here for a visit, we have the team clean the entire upstairs floor plus our completely finished basement. That’s over twice the area to clean. Despite the additional time and work, every time we call to schedule the extra cleaning they always accommodate our request. That would have been unthinkable with our previous cleaning service. When you hire The Maids, you are dealing with a finely tuned organization that is so much more than just the maids themselves.”
“In my business, I’m involved in inspecting fire damage,” he says. “All day I am literally up to my knees in filth. When I come home, I want my home to be immaculate. These people have yet to let us down.”
Jim has his own take on The Maids’ flexibility.
“We built a custom island in the kitchen that’s my baby,” Jim adds. “And while we enjoy the proprietary products The Maids use to clean our home, I did happen to find a particular granite cleaner that I have asked them to use on my island. They do so every visit and I couldn’t be more pleased with the results. I really appreciate their willingness to work with our needs.”
To make the first step toward a cleaner home and a happier you, contact The Maids to receive a free consultation and a no-obligation estimate over the phone. Call 440-735-6243 or 330-220-0098. For more information, visit TheMaidsNortheastOhio.com.