Six Tips for getting more referrals for your cleaning business

The number-one way to ensure quality referrals is to give great service in the first place. The happier your customers are, the more likely they’ll be to refer their friends and colleagues in your direction.

Here are six tips for making sure your current customers are as pleased as possible. Work hard at this, because nothing else gives you more return on your effort than great service.

Six Tips for more referrals

1 – Provide a way for customers to contact you. Whether it’s a phone number or an email address, have customer service contact information and make it easy to find on your website. There’s nothing more frustrating from the customer’s side of things than to have issues and not have a way to get them resolved.

Another bonus to this approach is that customers will feel more comfortable about purchasing from you or doing business with you if they know they can easily reach you if something goes wrong.

2 – Set expectations. If you’re a solo-preneur and only check email between 9-10 AM, you need to let your customers know that you won’t be on call 24/7. Likewise, if you only answer your phone at certain times, letting clients know beforehand will head off any concerns about non-responsiveness. You can post your “office hours” on your website, or create an outgoing message or auto-responder email that lets people know when to expect a response from you.

Please keep in mind that in today’s “fast paced” world of instant communication and gratification, anything more than 24 hours is considered long. So try to work up a system that gets back to people within the same day if at all possible.

3 – Respond to issues as quickly as possible. It’s never fun to read or listen to customer complaints, but playing ostrich and hiding your head in the sand won’t make them go away so don’t try that approach.

If anything, the longer you delay, the more irate your customers will be and the harder it will be for you to appease them. But by answering quickly then responding appropriately, you can actually head off molehills that could soon become mountains as tall as Mount Everest.

4 – Under-promise and over-deliver. If you think it will take a day to resolve a customer’s issue, tell them you’ll get back to them in two days – and then surprise them by doing it sooner. Under-promising and over-delivering is a quick path to customers’ hearts.

5 – Take the extra step. Do whatever it takes to make the customer happy – then go one more step. Offer a refund before it’s asked for, provide exemplary service, and find ways to thrill your customers. They’ll pay back your efforts in loyalty – and referrals!

6 – Hire help. Outsourcing your customer call center should be one of the first efforts you make once you have the money to invest. For as little as $100 to $150 a month you can get someone else to handle your incoming customer calls for you – a wise investment.

This allows or you to ditch the answering machine and provide a real live person to each individual who contacts your company. When you implement these ideas, you’ll see your customer satisfaction and natural referrals skyrocket.