How to Choose a UK Commercial Cleaning Company

Sometimes identifying the advantages for a business of attaining a commercial cleaning service is the easier part. The difficult bit - can be in finding and sifting through local or national offerings; trying to ascertain the best value, and who might be the best commercial cleaning company to choose.

Not only is it about finding assurance in gaining the quality of service that you or your client deserve, but about procuring the right commercial cleaning company for your business:

What to look out for when choosing a commercial cleaning company

The importance of cleanliness to a business is in the experience that a clean workplace, or public area, offers to every stakeholder involved: and what this represents for a business. In today’s world, a clean environment emphasises compassion for wellbeing and safety, and is of essential importance in a world shaped by the global pandemic. Post pandemic, the importance will remain as instilling confidence amongst your customers and employees will be vital to success and keeping people safe.

With such power to influence the minds and outlooks of staff, customers and investors, and in turn the operations and output of a business, there are high stakes involved in making the right choice for attaining a commercial cleaning service. The risks and costs involved if you choose to clean in-house or select the wrong provider can be great: It’s important to make the right choice, so, what do you look for?

What do you need from a commercial cleaning service?

Professionalism. You need professionalism in both quality of service and the approach of staff: And you need a team with the unity to provide this.

Professionalism and effective management offer from a service:

• Results
• Efficiency
• Value and return on investment
• Reliability
• Attention to detail
• Consistency
• The ability to work with you. Or the flexibility to suit your business needs.

But with a plethora of companies declaring this in their offering, where do you start? Where do you find the assurance that this is what you will get?

Looking for assurance when choosing a commercial cleaning service

The best way to be assured of quality is to witness first-hand. The next best way is to find this assurance in three key areas:

1. Experience & credentials
2. Indicators of professional operations
3. Reputation

1. Experience & credentials

The clearest marker of quality to find assurance in a commercial cleaning company is in their experience and credentials.

Look out for things like:

• The size of the company and operations: How big and how far reaching their operations are can be a reliable indicator of quality of service. A larger, national cleaning company that offers services locally, comes with the assurance of extensive experience, proven successful management, likely a more diverse offering of services and the ability to be more flexible, with the added comfort that many clients before you have made the same choice. Take a look at our blog with some of the benefits of choosing a national commercial cleaning company for more details. - This is not to say that a smaller company in a locality close to you couldn’t offer you the best solution, or that they wouldn’t offer a professional service. You may just need to be more vigilant in making your assessment of them. Keep reading for more on finding the right fit!
• How long has the business been operating for? Time is the very definition of experience. Long standing cleaning businesses come with all of the knowledge and hindsight gain over years of experience; something you will definitely benefit from as a client. - Again, this is not to say that time operating is the only way to find assurance about the quality of a cleaning business, but there can be higher risks when hiring a very young commercial cleaning company, or a company who has only just started offering these services.
• Services and expert services: Look at the range of services and at what expert services a commercial cleaning company offers.

2. Indicators of professional operations

Looking for indicators of professionalism in a commercial cleaning company’s offering

Look out for indicators like:

• Website: A company’s website can be a great place to start as an indicator of quality of service. Do they have appropriate information available? A modern, secure and accessible website? Effective ways to get in touch? Even a company’s branding can be an indicator of their approach to running their business. – In the same breath, a flashy website can sometimes just be an exterior polish, so don’t make any decisions based on website alone. Remember it’s a balance and keep reading to find out more.
• Communications: The quality of a company’s communications and customer service are the first indicator you will get of ongoing service and a company’s approach to operating. If you find professionalism here, you’re more likely to find quality across a service.
• Local delivery: Whether a company operates nationally or in more refined locations, local knowledge can be a good indicator that you will receive a higher quality, more reliable service.

3. Reputation

Reputation is the most difficult area to assess because of the inherent biases in the information you are likely to find. For example, it is in a commercial cleaning company’s best interest to market success stories, and in the same breath, negativity is more likely to be shared by customers than positivity: people are always quicker to complain than complement. So, without a transparent and incentivised reviewing or reporting system, how do you look objectively at commercial cleaning companies’ reputations?

The clearest way to gauge reputation of a commercial cleaning company can be through looking at the clients who have chosen to work with them. It’s safe to say, that just like the process you are currently going through, these clients will have undergone their own research, made their own assessments, and the commercial cleaning company will have presented the right solutions and approach to win the contract. This can be helpful in making your own assessment.

Beyond this, try to look at opinions from all sides and bear in mind what you have learned looking at points one and two above. Keep an open mind and look holistically at:

• Testimonials
• Direct references
• Reviews

Finding the right fit: The best commercial cleaning company for a business

Even with assurance of quality, you need the best commercial cleaning company to fit around a business and its operations. You need to talk to the company.

The right questions for finding the right commercial-cleaning-fit

• Does the cleaning company have the right sized workforce available to deliver in the timeframe needed?
• When does your business operate? Does the commercial cleaning company offer a 24-hour service?
• Do they have the right specialist knowledge and equipment to service the business’ specific needs?
• Do they understand what the business does, offers and needs? Do they take the time to understand?
• Where is the commercial cleaning company based? Do they have the infrastructure in place to service your business?
• Are they approachable with changes in a business’ needs?
• Can the service grow with you?

No business is exactly alike, and you need a commercial cleaning company who recognises this.

What does having the best commercial cleaning company do for a business?

The simple answer is ease. And over time observing a cascade of positive effect throughout a business, most importantly in the mindset of key stakeholders:

First impressions are crucial for any business, and when it comes to your business premises, making the right impression with a dazzling workplace can influence more than you might think. Take a look at the impact of cleanliness on learning in higher education as just one example of how the cleanliness of the environment around us can influence how effectively we work. And as much as a clean workplace can have positive effect, unhygienic workplace statistics reveal the opposing influence that an unclean environment can have on wellbeing and performance. The same goes for the customers, clients, visitors or potential investors who walk through your door: cleanliness fosters positivity.

It’s not just about positive perceptions though. The pandemic has highlighted the crucial role hygiene and cleanliness play in protecting people and keeping people safe. With poorly trained or inexperienced cleaners, you may end up putting anyone who walks through your door and the wider community at risk.

Having the best commercial cleaning company for your business, through being appropriately skilled and equipped to offer quality and in offering services tailored for your needs, can harness this potential: An effective commercial cleaning team can mean the difference between transforming environments for a more efficient, more successful, business - and losing money to a company that fails to deliver the grade, and won’t achieve the same positive knock-on effect (potentially even causing negative onward effect).

What’s more, and as an added bonus, efficient commercial cleaning can reduce maintenance costs for your buildings too!

With such key influence on so many integral components of your business, it is worth the time invested in research, and the value will be clear, if you get the right commercial cleaning company on the job.

Look for assurance from quality markers and be thorough in assessing if a commercial cleaning company can meet your business needs. Try to make sure these two areas complement as much as possible: looking for the minimum trade-off between the two.

The right commercial cleaning company is out there; don’t wait to discover the rewards of an effective contract.

Finding out if Jani-King is the best commercial cleaning company for your business

Needless to say, that we’d love to be the right commercial cleaning company for your business – but we’ll let you discover if we can offer the best commercial cleaning services for you.

A little bit about us:

We’ve spent over 50 years working out how we can offer the best to our clients, growing, and becoming a national cleaning company offering services local to you.

To become this, we’ve won the trust of a wide variety of some of the largest and most recognisable businesses in the UK. Just a few of these well-known examples can be found on our clients page, with other examples including stadium contracts, discoverable in our blog,. While we can’t publish details on all clients, we certainly can offer you more information should you like to get in touch below.

We are able to be the best to these clients most importantly because we want to be the best for them:

We understand the value of the highest quality commercial cleaning to your company, and our value is in this understanding, teamed with our extensive experience and skilled services that we are equipped to offer. Too many commercial cleaning companies stop caring and stop delivering the best quality over time (we know this unfortunately because too many clients come to us having had such negative experiences with other companies in the past. Take a look at four telling signs that your cleaning company has stopped caring if you think this might be happening to you.). At Jani-King, we care, and are experience allows us to offer diverse services equipped for your needs.

The best of both worlds for our businesses

We’re proud to offer the best of both worlds for our business; a global brand but with a local approach.  With locations across the UK, we can have your cleaning covered – whether you own 1 facility or 100. Simply get in touch with our friendly team today by calling +44 (0)800 917 3293 and find out how we can meet your needs.