6 Tips for Improving Janitorial Inspections; and Client Happiness

Many successful businesses in the facility maintenance, custodial, and cleaning services industries pride themselves on their quality control programs. The key activities included in these programs are usually employee training, client feedback and janitorial inspections.

Janitorial inspections are one of the best ways to measure the service your staff is delivering to clients, gain insights on where they are excelling and where they need to improve, and retrain to continuously improve.

In this blog, we’ll reveal six tips for improving your janitorial inspections, so you can boost client happiness and retention.

1. Use a janitorial inspection checklist
2. Perform unannounced inspections at the end of a shift 
3. Send trained supervisors to complete inspections
4. Use mobile form software
5. Send reports to clients
6. Measure often

1. Use a janitorial inspection checklist

Create a janitorial inspection form that includes a list of all items that need to be checked. This helps focus your teams on checking what’s important to your clients during the inspection and ensures nothing is forgotten.

Your clients may have different priorities when it comes to which area of their building receives the most attention from your teams. Customize your janitorial inspection forms for clients that have special requests by including extra questions that will verify whether or not their needs are being met.

2. Perform unannounced inspections at the end of a shift 

Inspections should always be performed once a shift is over and before the client uses the building again (when it’s possible for the latter). To get the most accurate results, your custodians should not know when an inspection is going to be performed. When a staff member is anticipating an evaluation, they may go above and beyond their standard performance - preventing you from gaining insights on where improvements need to be made. These insights are crucial for improving in order to keep your clients happy.

3. Send trained supervisors or managers to complete inspections

Only trained supervisors and managers should complete inspections. When promoting your quality control programs to prospective clients, having certified inspectors shows your programs are effective and thorough.

During training, highlight things that are important to you and your customers and go into great detail when describing what meets your standards and what doesn’t. This helps empower supervisors to easily and accurately fill out a janitorial inspection form.

4. Use mobile form software to perform inspections

While the importance of inspections is undeniable, many businesses are hesitant to perform inspections frequently or even at all because of the inefficiencies caused by paper based processes. Paper forms are time consuming, costly and risk inaccurate data. A simple solution to these problems is mobile form software.

With mobile form software, you can easily import your existing checklists and forms and convert them to mobile, build new ones using a form builder, or select from pre-made mobile forms for your industry. Your teams can complete inspections on any mobile device and the results will be instantly uploaded and automatically sent in a PDF report to the right people - eliminating time spent driving back to the office and then entering the results into the computer.

Capabilities like photos, features groups (this helps easily customize forms for each client), and action plans help give you a richer look at team performance and improve performance faster.

5. Send reports to your clients

Transparency is a great way for your clients to trust that you have their best interest in mind and that you are delivering on the services and standards you promised. Send monthly reports to your clients to demonstrate that everything is to standard or highlight what improvements are found during each monthly inspection.

6. Measure often

Quality control programs don’t just have to consistent of one monthly inspection. While paper processes can make frequent measurement challenging, mobile form software makes it easy to measure as often as you want. Measuring more often helps keep your teams on track and gives you more insight into performance so you can continuously drive improvements and consistent performance - and keep your clients happy!

Conclusion

The key to a successful facility maintenance, custodial or cleaning services business is performing regular janitorial inspections. Inspections allow you to identify how your teams are performing and where you can improve, so you continue to deliver quality services and drive client happiness. Six tips for improving your inspections are:

1. Use a janitorial inspection checklist
2. Perform unannounced inspections at the end of a shift 
3. Send trained supervisors to complete inspections
4. Use mobile form software
5. Send reports to clients
6. Measure often