CASE STUDY

Cleaning Up Issues With Mobile CRM

By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor  |  February 01, 2011

This article originally appeared in the Feb. 2011 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions

Mobile CRM applications are not just for sales reps that are on the go. They are becoming vital tools to identify and resolve issues anytime, anywhere that results in increased customer satisfaction and business. Here is one such example:

Founded in 1991, Corporate Cleaning Services Ltd (CCS) provides high quality janitorial and related services to commercial and industrial clients across the fast-growing Metro Vancouver, B.C. Canada region. It has a team of seven supervisors and 80 work crews who clean over 2.5 million square feet of space every night.




The firm prides themselves on their customer service and the rigor with which they inspect and stand behind their work. The supervisors regularly visit each site to perform quality control audits.

Founder and owner Mark Sippola’s vision for CCS was to use information to effectively manage his business and distinguish it from competitors by offering that higher-quality level of service. He sought to speed up responses to service issues, and to ensure that they were being addressed in concert with each other with an effective mechanism where day supervisors would enter these problems on records that the night supervisors could easily access and resolve. He was seeking complete records to show to his clients the tangible actions that he and his team conducted to fix issues.

In 1995 CCS installed CRM software, from Maximizer CRM. With it, supervisors would work with cleaning crews and make notes of any client issues and then go to the office and enter their findings into the database. Yet while this was a great improvement over the old process, which was to write the inspection results onto a photocopied inspection sheet and file this sheet into the client’s physical folder at its office, this duplication of effort required more labor. There were time lags between issue identification and database entry, which sacrificed immediacy and sometimes led to errors. There was also no means to accurately track issue status in realtime.

In early 2010 Sippola decided to deploy a mobile CRM application. He set several key goals including improving customer satisfaction, issue response and resolution speeds, customer information accuracy and timeliness. He also wanted to raise accountability for solving customer issues and problems with staff and crews. He turned to Maximizer and in May 2010 went live with Maximizer All Access version 11 Group Edition.

Maximizer Mobile CRM began filling in Sippola’s vision by permitting CCS supervisors to create customer service cases and enter notes from inspections in realtime on their BlackBerries while at clients’ sites, which sped up issue resolution and boosted customer information accuracy and timeliness. CCS uses the Maximizer CRM Customer Service module to identify customer problems immediately; it begins tracking and following up on outstanding incidents and their resolution. Applying these features has created, says Sippola “a culture of accountability both for the customer service supervisors and for the individual cleaning crews.”

CCS has been evolving its Maximizer Mobile CRM application. The onsite crews now take pictures of the flooring or carpeting material to be cleaned so that they can use the appropriate products. They attach the images to the customers/facilities records, send them and CCS supervisors immediately help them find the right approaches to use. The sales staff now uses the Maximizer solution to identify potential opportunities with new customers.

The results paint a pretty picture for CCS. Maximizer Mobile CRM has increased client satisfaction by allowing supervisors to address issues quicker, improving reporting and updates. Performance and efficiency has improved; supervisors now manage more cleaning crews and facilities, and by avoiding duplicating data entries and by obtaining realtime accurate information, so have employee satisfaction. There is increased accountability and incentive for staff to ‘take action’ and address customer issues quicker. These achievements, and business growth has prompted CCS to add another supervisor.

“For at least a decade I have been waiting for the day when the technology caught up with my vision of providing my staff with real time reporting and monitoring of customer relationships,” says Sippola. “This latest version of Maximizer has hit the nail on the head as far as my vision is concerned.”


Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi