Know the Right Questions to Ask Before you Hire any Cleaning Services for your Home
Finding a Charlotte maids service that you can truly trust can be quite a difficult task. With so many options, ranging from national players to single employee mom and pop operations, it’s easy to get lost in the process of finding the right home cleaners. Prices can range from $15-50 an hour, so different companies are going to come with different ups and downs. So here are some questions that we recommend asking to really get a feel of who you’re working with and more importantly, what kind of people they employ.
1. How Long Have you been in the business?
It takes more than a base level of cleaning knowledge and a mop bucket to start and run a good sustainable maid service Charlotte NC. With cleaning businesses, an estimated 50% will go under within the first year. By the end of the fifth year of business, nearly 90% will have shut their doors for good. So this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t go with the newer company, but more established maid services that have been around longer tend to be more trustworthy, experienced, and professional.
2. Are you Insured?
Having the proper insurance with quite a large amount of coverage is just vital when you’re in this industry, you never want something to go wrong but if we all know anything about life, it likes to go wrong when you least expect it. An uninsured cleaning company will, of course, be able to offer you lower prices. But what are you going to do when you realize your favorite clock was broken? Or your wood floors have been accidentally scratched beyond repair? Well if they’re not insured the short of it is, you’re going to be footing that bill. So always get some kind of insurance verification before making a deal. They should have a written policy they can show you anytime for breakage/damage.
3. Do You Carry Workers Compensation Insurance?
If you work with an independent maid or small business, you run the risk of them not having workers comp insurance. This means if a maid is somehow injured while working in your home, you could end up being liable for that, and truly nobody wants that.
4. How do you go about Pre-screening Employees?
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for house cleaners to be doing this work because they struggle to get other jobs with a criminal history. With this in mind, you aren’t at all out of place to ask about hiring practices, background checks, references, and more. You need to be smart about who you give access to your home, you don’t want just anyone coming in there.
5. What kind of training do they give?
The average industry turnover is quite high, a lot of services are just looking for warm bodies they can send out. It’s not uncommon for new hires to be expected to learn on the job. The best companies will have formal and document training processes that they’ve tweaked and worked out since opening. On-going training ensures high quality and leads to lower turnover, which is the ultimate goal of house cleaning Charlotte NC.
6. Do you work off of a checklist that I can see?
This is really important, as different maid services are going to have different ideas as to what a basic cleaning consists of. You need to know what you’re going to be paying for before anything happens so you can compare cleaners and make the right choice for you. Confusion usually comes down to things like making beds, cleaning dishes, and doing laundry. These tend to be more “housekeeper” tasks as they are more menial, but if you make sure to communicate and ask before your maid comes in, they should tell you whether they’ll do it for you or not.
7. What kind of quality assurance do they have?
You need to figure out how they gauge the quality in the long-term. Do they do quality checks, mail surveys, survey cards, or do follow-up calls? How frequently do they do this? Is someone in charge of quality assurance?
8. What Happens if I’m not satisfied?
If you aren’t satisfied with something and the maid service won’t come back or give you a future discount for it, you can count on never using them again. A reputable service should come right back and take care of whatever it is, or be willing to offer you a discount of some sort to make up for it. Mistakes happen, we’re all human.
9. Who Provides the Cleaning Gear?
The general rule is that the cleaning brings their own supplies, but it doesn’t hurt to ask beforehand if you’re going with a smaller cleaning service to make sure. It should be a red flag to you though, a good maid service should have standardized requirements for gear and cleaners to go along with whatever training they give.
10. How do You go About Getting into an empty home to clean?
If you’re going to have maids coming into your home, not only do you need to be sure you can trust them but you need to figure out how they go about getting into your home. Ideally, the cleaning service will have one copy of your house key that they keep locked up and is only accessible by a manager or owner. The manager should be retrieving and giving just the one key to the maid as they head to the job, so your key is always going to be accounted for. If a cleaning service requests you leave a key outside or doesn’t have a strict guideline, you need to be wary.
Professional Home Cleaning Services
So these are just a few things to really look out for before you take that step and hire a maid service to come to clean your home. You don’t want anyone in there that isn’t going to do their best work and take great care while in your home. It’s worth doing your due diligence to ensure good results. You should feel at liberty to ask about anything you’re not sure about, you are paying for the service after all.
If you’re in the Charlotte area and are looking for residential maid services, The Organic Maids are the way to go. Even if you’re not deadset on an organic cleaning, our cleaning services are the best in the area so if you want the best clean from the most professional crews around, you need us. Contact us today and we’ll get you a free cleaning quote as quickly as we can! Living in Charlotte? Check out Charlotte maids now!