Whether maintenance requests are slipping through the cracks or you want to increase employee productivity—CleanTelligent’s work order software can help.
In-house and contracted janitorial teams manage work order programs that are full of tension. On one side, incoming service tickets give your team a sense of job security. As a building service contractor, this is a great way to generate additional revenue.
However, additional requests can pull your team away from your standard contracted services. If you are going to manage a successful cleaning service, you must find a dynamic balance between these two forces. If you fail to find balance, it could affect:
- Customer Retention Rate
- Building Patron Foot Traffic
- Employee Productivity and Engagement
Another hidden cost in your work order program is the amount of paper you are using and printing. According to Mashable, the average U.S office employee uses about 10,000 sheets of paper a year. At about 12 cents a page that is costing your team an additional $1,200 per year!
If your team is going to find a way to balance all of these forces, you must evaluate and refine your entire work order process. Here’s how you can manage maintenance requests and janitorial work orders with software:
Identifying and Reporting Work Orders
An effective janitorial work order life cycle recognizes that inspectors and building patrons interact with your front-line cleaners differently. To that end, you must give everyone using the facility a way to funnel their observations to your staff.
Our maintenance software gives facility visitors a way to share their experience in the facility:
- An inspector will document cleaning deficiencies in the digital inspection report.
- A manager can schedule preventative maintenance and periodic cleanings in advance.
- A customer may use our work order app to submit a maintenance request or complaint.
- A building patron may scan a QR code and send a mobile survey response.
Once entered, our work order management software will convert the information into tickets and store them in the software’s work order inbox. The automation will dramatically reduce the amount of time spent relaying messages.
Prioritizing and Planning Service
If possible, reinvest some of your saved time into strategic project management. With access to every maintenance request from our work order app, you can go through each ticket and confirm that:
- The service request falls within the scope of work. If it doesn’t, flag it, figure out the cost of service and give your stakeholder a call. The conversation allows the stakeholder an opportunity to provide additional funding, withdraw the request, or rearrange tasks.
- The information is complete and accurate. If a customer submits a ticket with a fast turnaround, it is okay to give them a call. You must find if it was a mistake or if they have an event coming up. The conversation helps you plan the best service for your customer.
- Cleaners have the appropriate materials and tools to complete the task. As you prioritize work, you must take into account your team’s access to specialty parts, tools, equipment, and employee knowledge. Skipping this step could hurt project margins.
As you confirm the three things listed above, our CMMS software gives you the ability to add notes to the task. As managers delegate tasks in the next shift meeting, everyone will automatically be on the same page.
Completing Janitorial Tasks
Armed with all the information in the service request, front-line custodians can confidently show up on-site with everything they need to take care of the task. With fewer trips to the supply closet, imagine how employee productivity is going to increase.
However, to achieve that goal, employees must stay engaged and focus on delivering one work order at a time. Why? Because even when cleaners are pushed to complete more tasks during a shift, the work must still pass inspection. Otherwise, the time savings is lost when you send someone back to fix it.
Our work order software gives users the ability to change the status of each task. This way when a customer, manager, or another cleaner logs in, they can see the assigned work order and see if someone is working on it or if it has been completed.
Closing Maintenance Requests
As team members complete and close out service tickets while using the mobile app, our software will automatically send an email to your customers and team managers. By automating the communication, employees feel that their time, efforts and energy are important.
Not only does this best practice keep everyone in the loop. It also creates a work environment that makes it easy for employees to focus on cleaning during working hours. All they have to do is change the status of the task and the software takes care of everything else.
Objectively Review Workload
The good news, our ready-to-use Work Order Dashboard acts as a scoreboard. As you implement new processes, your team can refer back to the scoreboard to see if they were successful and see how far the needle moved.
Once your team hits your goal response time, you can use the team’s results to win new business. Likewise, if you are part of an in-house team, you could use it to set the industry standard for your facility type.
As you streamline your work maintenance request and janitorial work order process, your team will have an easier time meeting deadlines. As your work order response and completion time decreases, the facility’s foot traffic will increase because people will feel safe in your building.
Use CleanTelligent Software’s work order management system to measure employee productivity today!
