It's 10 AM Tuesday and you drive to a dry cleaner, the door is locked, no hours are posted and you're standing there with your arms full of dirty clothes. If you're like most people, you'll never go back. A carpet cleaning firm's front door is their telephone, and many are guilty of the same customer neglect. The excuse is, "I can't afford to hire someone to answer my phone."
Shoppers only speak with a knowledgeable person about 20 percent of the time when calling a carpet cleaning firm. Most calls are answered by voice mail or ignored altogether. Some cleaners think that if they appear to be too busy to answer the phone, they must be good and people will wait for them to call back. The truth is that most prospects simply call the next cleaner listed in the Yellow Pages or other reference source.
Unless you're the government, a utility or a very large corporation, you'd better have a real, live, intelligent person answer your phone. No cleaning company has ever failed because it couldn't remove a stain, but many have shut their doors because they didn't respond to the opportunity.
©Bane-Clene® Corporation 2010 Reprinting or electronically publishing this article is strictly prohibited without permission from Bane-Clene Corp.
