Monday, March 1, 2010

Start a Cleaning Business - Acquiring & Servicing Customers is Key

If you want to start a cleaning business, you will not only need to acquire new customers but also retain them. Did you know that it costs ten times less to sell to an existing customer than a new customer?

This may seem obvious, however, studies confirm that less than half of companies or people in business really care about customer service. Therefore, here is some advice.

• Listen to the customer. Listen to their needs, their desires, their fears, their frustrations. When was the last survey done among your customers?

• The customer is always right. Really? Of course not! The customer is always right in the sense that if he decides to spend his money elsewhere, you lose the business, so...

• Three words to avoid. The three worst words to say to a client are: "This is not our job!"; "We've always done it like that!"; "Sorry, it's our policy!". Never forget that a dissatisfied customer speaks, on average, to eleven other people about his experience with suppliers of service or hard goods.

• Manage complaints. Remember that for one customer who complains, 28 other clients have had the same thoughts but chose to say nothing.

• Say thank you. It is important not to take customers for granted. Create a sense of loyalty among existing customers. Put in place a recognition program to thank your best customers, at least once a year.

When you start a cleaning business, the most important principle to adopt is to offer a service of exceptional quality so that after a certain time, through word-of-mouth, it is no longer necessary to invest time and money to promote your services.

You need to spend a lot of energy and money to better know your customers, from day one of their acquisition. In the cleaning industry, service and customer relationship are paramount.

The other important element to start a cleaning business and quickly generate significant revenues is the ability to acquire new customers. To a great extent, your success is a function of the level of demand in a given market.

At your fingertips is the opportunity to take advantage of a virtually unknown industry that very few people in the cleaning industry even know exist. This is a super opportunity to generate significant revenues within an industry that is not saturated, namely real estate foreclosures.

Every day, mortgage companies require that foreclosed properties be secured via lock changes, that minor repairs be performed and that the property be cleaned up for the future new owner.

In the month of June 2009 alone, 32% more default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions were reported on properties compared to 2008. This increase meant that 360,149 U.S. properties, only in that month, potentially needed cleaning and maintenance work.

Financial institutions have a desperate need for reliable independent cleaning contractors in states and local communities to perform foreclosure cleanouts. The demand in this market is huge and it is virtually untapped.

This makes the process of new customer acquisition to start a cleaning business so much easier and faster when the level of competition is low.

By : Marc_Fields

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