Here in Part 5 of our 8-part home cleaning franchise series, we look at key questions to ask potential franchisors around requirements and support for employee training.

If you know the backstory of McDonald’s as one of the biggest, most successful food-service franchises in the world, you’ll know the true secret sauce is not the one they put on the Big Mac®. Rather, it’s Ray Kroc’s relentless emphasis on creating consistency both in food quality and in the cleanliness and presentation of the chain’s restaurants and staff. While it’s relatively easy for food-service franchisors to control food quality through distribution and using standard equipment, controlling service quality presents a whole different level of difficulty.
 

For home-cleaning franchises, controlling service quality is even more critical, especially in an age of online search engines where a single negative online review or news story has the potential to become greatly amplified, undermining a brand’s reputation. Four keys to creating consistent service quality are:

• Researching and understanding best practices both for cleaning and minimizing risks to customer property.
• Thoroughly training new service staff and refreshing existing staff on how to execute best practices consistently.
• Routinely inspecting work, encouraging feedback from customers, and objectively tracking performance metrics such as customer attrition rates by employee.
• Constantly evaluating and updating best practices as cleaning technology evolves, then efficiently transferring new knowledge to cleaning staff.

While training is a crucial building block for ensuring service quality, it can easily become a big business expense when not managed efficiently. The good news: there’s technology to solve this challenge too. E-learning modules delivered through a robust Learning Management System (LMS) enable big training cost efficiencies. An e-learning approach also creates:

• Opportunities to control quality of training.
• Convenience for staff who can access training 24/7 from any web-connected location or using mobile devices.
• Structured means for assigning training modules, tracking attendance, and even measuring knowledge absorption.

So, three simple questions to ask any potential franchise partner with respect to how they will help you to ensure service quality through consistent training of employees:

• How much should I expect to invest in employee training?
• Do you create and supply up-to-date content and materials that I can use to train new and existing staff?
• Does your approach to employee training encompass e-learning/LMS solutions that control both costs and quality of training while enabling me to track and measure training coverage and effectiveness?

MaidPro has created their very own LMS, MaidPro University, to help our owners train their employees professionally and easily. Our training covers cross contamination, proper use of cleaning supplies, and how to work around pets...just to name a few of the 20+ courses. It is even available in both English and Spanish!

Stay tuned for Part 6 in our series in which we’ll focus on what a franchisor can and should do to help you close more sales and ultimately grow your business.