ServiceMaster Clean Contract Services Exeter was established in 1991 and now cleans nearly 200 sites across the South West region, employing over 160 staff. The team tries to build longstanding relationships with customers, and aspires to an exceptional level of customer service in order to earn their loyalty. Having accurate and up to date information about the business is critical to managing every aspect of it. With a change in management in early 2014, a need to update the IT was identified, and Cleanlink was chosen to provide the platform for managing the business going forward. When searching for a software solution to support their business needs, Greg Evans, the Exeter Franchise Managing Director said:

“I wanted ‘one version of the truth’. A software package that would give me all of the tools to be able to manage my business from front to back, so that I didn’t have to knit together several different packages which dealt with different parts of the business and risk duplicating data and having to update the same piece of data in several different places. I was also coming in to a business that had been run by the same management team since 1991, when the business started from scratch, with no employees and being run from home.

During that time, they had managed the business with much of the contract information being stored in a mixture of traditional filing cabinets, staff memory and standalone PCs. Contact data for our sites, as well as alarm codes, callout arrangements, cleaning hours, task schedules and cleaners’ contact details was all recorded on paper sheets in ring binders which the supervisors held, with a master copy in a bigger lever arch file. This system had evolved, and worked because most of the management knew the business inside out. I was simply not capable of learning and retaining all that information! If I (or any of our staff) was working away from the office, I wanted to be able to access all the information at our fingertips and not be disadvantaged by not having access to the filing cabinet!”

When asked why they selected CleanLink’s software solution in early 2014, Greg further commented: “When CleanLink came to present the system, their Sales Manager – Lyn, demonstrated everything that it can do, from recruiting and paying staff, to managing relationships with prospects and customers, to managing the operational delivery of our contracts, to managing the stock in our warehouse, Cleanlink does it all. Cleanlink had also been recommended to me by ServiceMaster Ltd, and the fact that so many other franchisees and other cleaning companies use it was also influential. I liked the story about how the system was written by someone who had run his own cleaning company and knew what the software needed to be able to do.”

The key benefits that the use of CleanLink’s Software products has given to ServiceMaster Clean (Devon) are listed below by Gregg:

• We are still in the process of migrating different parts of the business over to Cleanlink, so the stock management is yet to come, but we have already seen huge time savings over the old processes in other areas. When we run the payroll, it flags in red if we pay an hour more than is budgeted for a particular site.
• When we invoice our customers, we are less likely to miss any because the system will warn us.
• When we carry out any additional work, we now just raise a one off invoice at the time, rather than keeping the details in a triplicate book until the date of the invoice run.
• We have all of our contact details in one place, whether it is a staff member, a subcontractor, a customer or a prospect, there is just one place to go to find the answer.
• We can record photos of specific cleaning issues to discuss with our staff.
• We are all still getting used to new ways of working but the mobile application, using iPads for QCs has been a great success.
• We now project a more professional image to our customers and prospects when we have the information to hand so easily.
• The suite of reports that is available is a big help in leading the strategic direction of the business. We have a much more transparent view of where we need to focus our resources, and a much more accurate idea of how profitable each site is relative to the others.