How to Handle Customer Complaints in a Cleaning Business as You Scale

The way to handle customer complaints in a cleaning business isn’t to promise you’ll never make mistakes. You will. Your crews are human. What keeps clients is a system that catches every complaint, routes it to the right person, and tracks it to resolution with a time stamp and a photo. Get that right and a mistake becomes a reason clients trust you more, not less.

On Tech & Tidy (Ep. 2) – The Evolving Landscape of Facility Management, I talked with Trey Brown of Office Pride. His parents, Tom and Julie, own the franchise; Trey runs customer experience, and his two younger brothers round out the leadership: Payton in business development and Colton in administration. They started one location on the north side of Indianapolis in October 2017, cleaning a couple of bank branches and an office park themselves with one or two employees. Trey was 17. Eight years later they’re pushing 300 employees and cleaning a little over 400 buildings across nine locations in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.

What facility managers expect now: not perfection, but a good recovery

Trey’s biggest observation is that client expectations have flipped since 2017. Back then, operational ability was everything. Did you clean it right the first time? That’s still table stakes, but it’s no longer what you’re judged on.

“We’ve gone from a world where the expectation is it’s done right the first time… to it’s more about how you handle when things don’t go right.”

There are floor-cleaning robots, he points out, but there aren’t cleaning robots. Human error is baked into this industry. A real relationship softens the blow when your team falls short, but only if you actually catch the problem and do something about it. That’s where the complaint workflow matters more than the apology.

Route every issue to the people who can fix it

Office Pride’s clients submit issues through a customer portal, and the routing is the part most owners skip. An issue doesn’t land in one inbox and die there. It goes to the cleaner at that specific site, then to that person’s area manager, then the office’s branch manager, then to Trey. Tom and Julie monitor issues daily.

Trey told a story that sounds staged but isn’t. When a larger client comes on, he visits to build their custom checklist and get them set up, and he’ll open a test issue from their portal right there in the meeting. While he’s sitting with them, his phone rings. It’s his dad, Tom, asking what’s going on because he saw the issue notification come through. Clients can’t believe it. The point lands: this company knows the second something’s wrong.

That kind of visibility is exactly what Groups & Multi-Location is built for: regional managers see their sites, owners see everything, and an issue reaches the right level automatically instead of getting stuck.

Track time-to-resolve, even for phone and email complaints

Here’s the metric Office Pride lives by: average time to resolve a customer complaint. To make that number honest, every complaint has to be in the system, including the ones that don’t come through it.

Plenty of clients still prefer a phone call or an email, especially the facility managers who’ve held their roles for 10, 20, or 30 years. Trey’s rule: when a complaint arrives that way, the leader who takes it logs it as an internal issue anyway. The time still gets tracked, the before-and-after photos and completion notes still get captured, and the team still gets held accountable. Without that discipline, the data evaporates the moment the call ends.

Keep the history: it tells you when to coach and when to change scope

The reason to centralize everything isn’t just accountability. It’s pattern recognition.

If a client reaches out about the same bathroom three times over a few weeks, Trey can see it at a glance. Now he knows he’s dealing with a recurring problem, not three random ones, which means it’s either a coaching opportunity with the crew or a sign the scope, frequency, or timing of that task needs to change. Scattered across texts, emails, and voicemails from leaders at every level of the org, that signal is gone. In one reporting view, it’s obvious.

Meet old-school clients where they are

Not every client wants your system, and Trey doesn’t force it. A few high-profile accounts prefer text or email, and some run their own internal ticketing systems and don’t want their staff entering tickets in two places. Fair. So Office Pride bridges the gap. Sometimes a leader gets access to the client’s system and translates the relevant issues into theirs. As Trey puts it, “We’re here to solve headaches, not to create new ones.” It feels like a heavier load than it is; it’s a percent of a percent of their accounts, even if it shows up in every office.

His advice for smaller operators still doing it the 2017 way: change is scary, but get on the technology train or get left behind. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Even a dedicated email inbox wired to a spreadsheet with Zapier, or a Google or Microsoft form that routes to the right site leader, beats a complaint living in one person’s head. When you can invest in a system built for it, do.

The takeaway for operators

You can’t promise perfect cleaning. You can promise that when something slips, it gets to the right person fast, gets fixed, and gets logged so it doesn’t happen again. That’s how a family that started with a couple of bank branches now keeps a pulse on 400 buildings.

Watch The Evolving Landscape of Facility Management on Clean Smarts YouTube, then book a demo to see how issue routing and resolution tracking keep your clients confident as you grow.