The Cleaning Authority - Concord

"Thank you for taking the time to post a review for us, we all appreciate it! Thank you as well for being a customer for over eight years...we do not take that for granted."

"Thank you for taking the time to post a review, we appreciate it."

"Thank you for taking the time to post this review. Team 4 will get a public "great job" award at next week's all-staff meeting!"

"Thank you for taking the time to leave a review for us, we appreciate it. We also appreciate the understanding of our pricing. Our average cleaner pay is $11.30 per hour plus vacation, paid holidays, retirement plan, medical, dental, vision, etc. We try hard to hire and keep good employees."

"I realize we have had a rough patch of B/C grades all at once lately, however this grade, while accurate in this customer's mind, would not be considered accurate by most any other person. I terminated this customer myself and refunded his final clean payment. We were never going to meet his expectations. He had a clean he considered inadequate. We sent another team out to fix their list of issues the next day. The Mrs. said she was very pleased with the finished product (we spent triple the expected time cleaning) and my team left. Then the Mr. called up. To paraphrase, he said the work done was good, however there was no excuse for us not emptying all the trash again on that 2nd visit. He gave my office manager a multiple-minute lecture about how, among other things, how unreasonable it was of us not to empty the trash again the next day. At that point, I realized this was a hopeless situation on my end, so I refunded his last payment and told him we were not the right fit for him. As a company, we did hit a rough patch while being drastically understaffed two to three months ago, but we have pulled out of that. I do believe we are operating again at the "Super Service Award" level we obtained in 2012 & 2014."

"Our apologies for making it difficult to schedule a one-time clean. Since her clean, we have actually turned off one-time clean availability through September 14. Despite an average pay rate of $11.26/hour and offering paid holidays, vacation, medical/dental/vision (50% paid), and retirement plan, we found ourselves critically short-staffed in July. As owner, I tripled the recruiting/hiring work and we have been blessed with many new highly-qualified employees. It takes a full month before we scale back the supervision of new employees, so we temporarily turned off one-time cleans until I feel comfortable growing the business again. Thank you for the honest feedback. If, as a member and reader of this feedback, you have not yet noticed, most of our less than stellar reviews come from one-time customers. When you've cleaned for someone 100+ times, both parties know what to expect. We need to get better at aligning expectations upfront with new customers...I feel that is our greatest weakness at the moment."

"Thank you for the review and the continued opportunity to clean your home. We appreciate both! 98% of our customers are on a regular schedule, but we are happy to work with anyone unable to keep such a schedule."

"Thank you for the review. Our worker's compensation policy does restrict our cleaners from being off the ground (ladders, stepstools, etc.), however we certainly should have discussed that with you during the walk-through. I will make sure our sales/pricing representative has that conversation with anyone going forward. Thank you for the business and for the advice."

"We cleaned 14 times over 14 months before this customer moved out of town. Not once did he reach out to us and communicate his dissatisfaction. It is painful to never be given the chance to correct a real or perceived problem. I hope that those reading this response will read my responses to other negative Angie's List reviews so they can see the lengths to which we go in an effort to please customers and resolve service issues."

"Ouch. Very sorry to find about someone this unhappy. This rating is (mostly) a result of not training our newer salesperson on the finer nuances of pricing and matching expectations on move-in cleans. She received three weeks of pricing/bid training from myself (Mike the owner) before I allowed her to do pricing on her own. However, this issue nails home the fact that there is more to teach. This resulted in: a) misaligned expectations, b) slightly unclear instructions from the bidder to the cleaners, and c) undercharging the job. Some of, but not all of, the quality issues brought up here were due to misaligned expectations. I will try to make sure this does not get repeated with future clients. The cleaners in this home had a combined six years experience at our company and have top-notch quality ratings (as graded by their existing clients). I'm not saying someone cannot or did not have a bad day, but I am sure misaligned expectations were the main culprit. After reading the unique cleaning instructions given to the cleaning staff, I feel the instructions could have been more clear. For example, the kitchen job note said "clean refrigerator and oven. Clean inside kitchen cabinets." It should have said "clean inside all kitchen cabinets, drawers, & under vanity. Clean refrigerator (including freezer as long as unit is not plugged in) and oven. Also, kitchen floor stains may or may not come up. Please let homeowner know if you have problems with this." We will work on this! Finally, the job was underpriced and perhaps put some unintended time pressure on the staff. Although all employees are instructed to clean until they are finished (regardless of time), it is possible for them to feel pressured when finding themselves going over the "suggested" time for the clean. In addition to spending about two labor hours more than the nine priced, we also somehow under-quoted the actual intended price. When a customer is unhappy with a one-time clean such as this, I try to always return any profit I made to the client. In this case, the clean was underpriced to the point that we lost money performing the clean. I know I need to fix something when we take a job, lose money doing it, and still provide a disappointing experience to someone! Thank you for the candor and advice in this review. We'll do our best not to repeat this scenario with anyone else."