“We realised we’d made a mistake moving away from CleanLink after we had some serious issues with our new supplier. When we knew we had to do something about it we didn’t consider anyone but CleanLink and kept asking ourselves why we ever left. We simply wanted to get back as we couldn’t cope with it anymore. Phil (our Financial Director) was pulling his hair out, it was just ridiculous” Andrew Moorwood, MD at Sentrex Services UK.
Sentrex Services UK Ltd, a commercial cleaning company has had a relationship with CleanLink going back many, many years, when both companies were relatively small. Whilst most business management systems were handled manually using lots of paper At that time Sentrex were using a competitor product which they realised wasn’t providing the right services for their business. Sentrex initially used CleanLink’s invoicing system as at that time payroll was not available nor was the link to HMRC, these came along later.
Despite the long relationship with CleanLink, in 2021 Sentrex made the decision to move their processes to another software provider, a decision they later regretted. Sentrex found themselves in a position where their T&A system (which was not supplied by CleanLink) was being discontinued and they had to look for an alternative solution. They engaged with a T&A supplier who claimed their system was ‘all set up to be integrated with CleanLink”. As CleanLink was Sentrex’s preferred payroll supplier, they believed this new system was perfect and moved things forward. However, after they had gone past the point of no return, they discovered they’d been misled, and the system wasn’t going to be compatible in the way they required; there wasn’t an open connection such as an API so they had to manually export the T&A spreadsheets into CleanLink.
Sentrex were encouraged to consider an alternative payroll product that would be more compatible – and which also happened to be owned by the same company. At the time Sentrex were unaware that CleanLink had recently completed a successful implementation with the same T&A system for another client with an employee base of over 3,500 staff. Whilst it wasn’t perfect, it delivered 90% of what the client wanted which meant they were able to do T&A for about 3000 of their staff.
“They sold us the dream of a combined package as we were so concerned the T&A wasn’t going to link to CleanLink. Now we realise they were leading us to moving over to all their products as they even matched CleanLink’s prices. Lots of carrots are dangled to wow you as I guess once you’re switched a lot of people don’t want to go through it again and move away. It’s a deliberate strategy to sell their own products and it guarantees them a certain amount of business. I think we were quite brave to make the decision to move back to CleanLink.” Phil Pitt Financial Director, Sentrex Services Ltd
CleanLink were aware that several clients had found themselves in a similar situation with this particular T&A supplier: investing a lot of money and finding it a complete failure. For one client it crippled their business, and they were not able to take on new sites or employees. Over time every single one has gone back to using their previous T&A system, which are compatible with CleanLink. What was being ignored by the supplier is that linking to CleanLink can be done at the push of a button and couldn’t have been simpler.
Sentrex stayed with this company for nearly 2 years and as the T&A system started to fail it had a huge impact on the business. A major issue was the supplier’s server not being able to cope with the volume of data needed to serve all their T&A clients. This resulted in Sentrex cleaners going on site, trying to log on to the system and getting errors. The reliability of the T&A data was completely lost, as all cleaning companies know, it is important to know when and how long cleaners are on site. Not only to pay their wage correctly, but to invoice the client accurately and also as a security issue. For example a lone worker could collapse on site and not be discovered for hours without a reliable log out process.
When Sentrex came back to CleanLink they were taken through a demo of the current products and felt a huge sense of relief as they realised, they were moving back to something they knew and trusted. They also quickly realised they had not been fully aware of CleanLink’s functionality hence why it had been easy to be seduced by someone else. They acknowledge that businesses are often too busy to engage with the full functionality of their systems and were therefore surprised by what it could deliver. Sentrex started back by using the original functions in a more effective way and are considering some of the new functionality such as the customer & staff portal to help get holidays booked and allow teams to see their payslips.
“The staff portal and booking holidays is going to be very useful. At the moment staff members have to contact their account manager and ask for holidays to be booked however account managers may be out on the road and sometimes forget to book it in. This does happen quite often, and we need to really improve on this” Phil Pitt Financial Director, Sentrex Services Ltd
They are also excited by the new annualised pay functionality being launched later this year. They have several school clients, and it will be a welcome enhancement as it considers term times. The benefit being that a work pattern can be set up for each site and each operative at that site and the annual salary can be calculated, this is then divided by the number of pay periods, so employees get regular payments during both term times and the holiday periods.
A key element Sentrex is really pleased with is the CleanLink team that’s now in place whom they feel are full of ideas and making lots of progress to improve products. With the other supplier, they saw a high turnover of staff and would often get ‘I’m new here so I’ll have to go away and try and work out what to do” from the customers services team. Sentrex has noticed that all new staff at CleanLink are so well rehearsed on the software and the different clients they haven’t even realised they’re new. Sentrex have also appreciated how responsive the team are to phone calls and whoever answers the phone is genuinely interested in wanting to help.
“It’s clear there’s lots of energy and you know what you want to do. When we ask for anything, the team respond very quickly. When we came back to you Chris came here for a couple of days without us even asking. The other company liaised with us remotely and whilst we’re comfortable with that, at no point did they offer to come to site. There’s a big advantage to being familiar with us as it makes you guys just so much easier to work with. It was clear the other business was unable to deliver against the needs of their clients – they just seem to blow up when things got busy. There is obviously great cross team communication as they all seem to know what’s going on. They really are a pleasure to deal with and getting customer services right is so important.” Phil Pitt Financial Director, Sentrex Services Ltd.
https://sentrex.co.uk
