Text Request Talks
4 Cleaning Franchise Customer Service Tips with ChemDry’s Erika Herman
Business texting can improve the customer service your cleaning franchise provides, but you need the right tactics in place.
Here’s how to use texting messaging to handle multiple customer conversations at once, schedule more services, and streamline your overall communication.
This article takes insights from our Text Request Talks podcast with Erika Herman and further distills it into advice specific to texting. Erika is the owner of multiple ChemDry locations, the Vice President of 1-800 Water Damage, as well as the CFO of Virtual Office Solutions.
The following tips expand on how to meet the same goals Herman does with text messaging.
Watch the full interview on YouTube.
1. Text-enable your current business number.
The better the customer experience you provide, the more customers you’ll attract.
Herman believes meeting customers where they’re at is the biggest part of providing the best experience possible. That’s why she text-enabled her business numbers, so customers can reach her the way they most prefer.
Text Request enables you to text from each of your location’s business lines, so your entire team can text from the same place. Each location can have its own line, and there’s no limit to the number of users.
Herman depends on text messaging to manage multiple conversations at once, book more services faster, and provide quality customer service that keeps customers coming back.
2. Invite customers to text you to schedule services.
77% of consumers want to initiate texts to businesses about scheduling appointments, which is why Herman makes sure her customers can.
Capturing a potential customer’s attention is time sensitive—especially if there are a ton of competitors in your area. The faster a customer can reach out by text and schedule an appointment, the more likely your service will be the one they choose.
One way your own business can enable customers to schedule appointments through text is by adding SMS Chat to your website. SMS Chat is a widget that current and potential customers can use to start text conversations with you. It can even be formatted to have a prompt that says, “Text us to schedule your next service!”
Once a customer reaches out to schedule a service using SMS Chat, you can text them back a link to select a time slot. You’ll then have their number saved for any service reminders and promotions later.
Text messaging helps Herman bring in new customers, even when she’s off the clock.
3. Respond to customers instantly with autoresponders.
Herman says you don’t want to be pulled away from your current customer whenever a new one calls in. That creates a bad experience for both of them.
The beauty of text messaging is that you can handle multiple conversations at the same time, plus create autoresponders to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
An autoresponder automatically sends a reply to all inbound messages. It can be turned on and off depending on the time of day. You can even have more than one autoresponder for different needs, including services being suspended due to inclement weather, or holiday and seasonal hours.
The best part is these autoresponses can be customized with instructions to keep your appointment flow going, like:
“Thanks for choosing [Company]! Use this link to fill out a request: [link] Someone from our team will get back to you shortly.”
Customers will be satisfied knowing their cleaning inquiry is in the system, and you get to keep business flowing.
4. Monitor customer text conversations for quality control.
If your cleaning franchise is going to continue to grow, Herman says you've got to set team members up to take on some of your work.
Text Request enables your entire team to text from one dashboard—but with your supervision and support—so communications don’t get bogged down because only one person is handling everything.
The shared dashboard makes it easy to jump in and see how your teammates are communicating with customers, so you can give them pointers on how to improve. You can also learn what FAQ’s customers have.
Ongoing coaching and monitoring like this is what Herman attributes to her locations’ success. Teammates will be able to take on the communication tasks you need them to, but with your help and guidance.
To guide your own team, you can create text templates for the FAQ’s you observe them getting from customers. You make the template once, save it, and then your team can reuse it forever. Text templates not only keep communication consistent, they also save you a significant amount of time when your team isn’t typing out the same messages over and over again.
How Else Can Text Messaging Grow Your Cleaning Franchise?
The above are just a few quick tips—but we have an entire in-depth cleaning text messaging playbook for those who want to learn even more ways to implement SMS into your processes.
Our business texting software has helped hundreds of cleaning services, and we’re ready to help yours next!
