How monthly clients gave us peace of mind
Accurately scheduled, the monthly client is a life saver
The first rule to learning to love your monthly clients is to NEVER promise them the same day or the same cleaners for their cleanings. Offer them the same week on the first available day with any cleaner/team in their area. You must be very organized in your scheduling to make this work but it is more than worth the effort. PLUS your scheduling should be organized and proactive or you are costing your company a lot of revenue!!
Every Friday we walked every job for the next 5 weeks. We made the appropriate adjustments to even out the schedule so we new exactly which days we needed jobs for 5 weeks. This allowed for rapid scheduling while selling the client on the phone. We rarely hung up without that client knowing exactly what day and time window the team would be arriving to clean. That, in itself, was worth the time it took to walk the schedule every Friday. We did not need to play text tag and not be able to book the next client because we are holding a spot that might not work for the client we are holding it for but might for the next client who we will need to play text tag with when we know that spot is not taken and the viscous cycle continues and becomes more stressful. When we were cleaning 95 jobs per day that task took 6 hours or almost a full working day. Again, I would never operate any other way. 6 hours of pay well spent.
On the day that we walked the schedule we also moved any monthly clients that ran the team (we worked teams of 3) over 6-7 hours per day. If you look at the below schedule you can see how great this worked. The first team we would most likely leave the monthly client where it is. The map code tells me they are south and the team can handle the day without much driving. The second team is over booked but easy to fix because there is a monthly client we can move to another team or even another day. By the map code they are probably in the same block as their other job but we NEVER changed teams for weekly and bi-weekly clients. If you are a monthly and want the same day and team then you need to switch to biweekly service (and a lot did).
Once the monthly clients were moved our software gave us a list of the monthly clients, scheduled day and contact info scheduled for two weeks out. We would print that report first thing Monday morning (2 weeks out) and contact all of the clients on the list on the Monday 1 week before their scheduled day. We used that list to highlight the names of the clients when they confirmed their date. Those who did not respond were contacted again on Tuesday and on Wednesday they were contacted stating if we did not hear from them by 5:00pm that day we would cancel their cleaning. That gave us 2 days to fill the opening.
We had 754 clients when I left. 80 were weekly, 124 were monthly and the remainder were every other week. Moving those monthly clients to where we had openings generally booked our teams and we never had to perform one time cleans. At our company that was our mission. It meant we kept our repeat clients happy and in all honesty we simply hated deep cleanings all at one visit.