Crazy Customer Story and Lesson Learned.

Welcome to all new subscribers! I really appreciate the support.

I quickly wanted to get this story out before our next post which highlights our “VA (virtual assistant) and her duties and how we have her manage a good portion of the customer service and tips on finding the right one). Stay tune for it later this week. 

On to this story and what we learned from it. All names have been changed to protect the privacy of the customers. Her current invoices is attached below 👇

This customer called “Jess” has been a customer since 2021 current revenue to date is Revenue to Date $8,605.00 per our ZenMaid.

You might be asking, depending on your market why on earth am i charging her $120. I agree this is extremely low and it’s actually our minimum to show up for a 1 hr appointment. Truth is we got this customer for $130 during the pandemic and after a year she complained and asked for a reduction. After all she lives alone and does not use much of her story 2 bedroom 2bathroom townhouse in a very exclusive part of town. The company was on growth mode so we were taking anything and everything and figured we would raise her at the beginning of next year, however all customers MUST be enrolled on auto billing if they want to use a credit card otherwise we do checks or cash. This customers gave out checks. Long story short this nightmare of a customer would micro observe, what is micro observe? Think micromanage but without saying anything just following the cleaners and observing them like a hawk.

She would file a complain once every month on a biweekly cleaning, some had merit some were plain unrealistic expectations. I mentioned she lived in a very exclusive part of town to highlight that she was a well of single professional working a corporate job and we are happy for her since those are the majority of clients we like to serve and help. This does mean that she has expensive furniture and fixtures, this includes a woven area rug.

Now on to the incident, the equipment we use is Sanitaire upright professional carpet vacuum. A standard for most professional companies, the vacuum has a rubber bumper that helps protect the vacuum against cracks. She claimed our vacuum left skid marks on her brown baseboards and refused to pay on July 26th 2024. We assured her we can remove them and we would during the august cleaning. August comes she does not leave a check and we clean anyways because we had to remove the markings which we did August 9th. August 23rd she complained about more markings and did not leave a check. So we showed up and cleaned up the baseboards. She stringed us along until September with more baseboards markings and claimed our vacuum pulled strings on her expensive area rug. After the September 20th cleaning, I called her to confront her over the phone and she claimed she wasn’t happy, I informed her of her current bill $600 and pretty much asked her what can we do to fix this. Again we are on growth mode at this point and i was ready to offer her a huge discount and give her a credit. Her answer was “I don’t what to do”, I offered the large discount and her response was “ I am not sure i can’t think right now” So I asked her what can we do to make her happy and figure this out and she pretty much said she does not know. So at this point I don’t know how to make this customer happy because she doesn’t even know what she wants. We cancelled her cleanings and emailed her the invoice with a small discount pending her decision on what she would like to do. Now she blocked the company number and ignored all emails. Are we on the wrong?

What we learned from this:

• Make sure you keep up with price increase religiously.

• Do not let customers ballon their invoice, don’t be the nice guy/girl and nip the issue in the butt

• Push customers to auto billing. %90 of customers pay with a card. Our credit card fees are close to $10k but it is less of a headache when running at scale.

• Make sure your cleaners are following System operating procedures to avoid issues like this.

• Last one If a customer is trouble FIRE THEM. It is just not worth the headache.

In the end we were profitable with this customer, but revenue should have been closer to $15k for that time period. Thank you for your time and have a great weekend!