Cleaning
How to serve cleaning customers in other languages
A cleaning company often has an office working in one language and crews working in another, with the customer a third case again. Nothing about the cleaning changes. What changes is who can answer the telephone at four in the afternoon.
The useful work here is small and written: say which languages the office answers in, and keep the handful of standard replies ready, so an answer does not wait for the one person who can write it.
This plan assumes there is a website already and somebody in the business can change it. If that is not you, the free check asks two questions and builds the version for your own business.
Six you can do yourself, five of them for nothing. One we would do, $99. One thing to leave alone.
This catalogue lists 27 businesses under Cleaning, and not one of them links an Instagram account. 2 of them publish no phone number, so somebody who wants to ring has to send a message instead. Not one of them publishes a price. Those are the businesses somebody is looking at beside you. Count them yourself: they are all on this site.
Step 1YouSay which languages you work in, in writingfree
Write the languages you and your staff actually work in into the Google profile description, into the top of the site, and into every bio. Name them: Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, whichever it is. Do not write the word multilingual.
Somebody looking for a plumber who speaks their language searches the name of the language, so the name of the language has to be written down somewhere a search engine can read it. It works in the other direction too. A customer who has already read that English is your second language is not surprised by it on the call, and the few who mind will pick somebody else before they have taken an hour of your afternoon.
List only a language you can serve in start to finish, including the follow up two days later. A language on the page that nobody in the business speaks today produces exactly the enquiry you cannot answer.
How long: an afternoon
Step 2YouWrite five English sentences and keep them by the phonefree
Write out five sentences you will need on every call and keep them where you take calls. The hours, the price range, the service area, how soon you can come, and this one: "my English is better in writing, can you text me instead".
On a live call there is no time to compose a sentence, so having it already written removes the part that is actually hard. The last sentence moves the whole conversation into writing, where you can read it twice and answer in your own time.
Owners are most reluctant to use the last sentence and it is the one that works. Asking to switch to text does not lose the customer. Asking them to repeat themselves four times does.
How long: an afternoon
Step 3YouSet up an automatic text when you miss a callvaries, see note
Use a business phone service that sends a text within seconds of an unanswered call, saying you are on a job and asking what they need. Most small business phone and CRM products do this. A plain cell phone does not.
The person who called you is still holding their phone and has not dialled the next number on their list yet. A text in that window keeps the conversation alive. A voicemail greeting is where the lead ends for any trade where somebody is working down three numbers.
Cost depends on the phone service you pick and is usually a small monthly fee. We have no conversion figure for this worth quoting: every number in circulation comes from the companies selling it.
How long: an afternoon
Step 4YouOffer text or WhatsApp as the first way to reach youfree
Put a number people can text, or a WhatsApp link, beside your phone number everywhere it appears: the Google profile, the site, the bios. Say in plain words that a text gets a faster answer than a call.
A live call is the hardest format there is for anybody working in a second language. It is real time, often over a bad line, with no pause to put a sentence together and somebody breathing on the other end while you do. A text arrives already written. You can read it twice, look up the one word you did not know, and answer it when you are out from under the sink. It is the same enquiry either way.
Answer them quickly or this is worse than not offering it, because the customer has now made contact and been ignored. If you cannot watch two inboxes, pick one number and point everything at it.
How long: an afternoon
Step 5You or usPut your prices, or a real price range, in writingfree
On the site and in the profile description, state what things cost. A range with what moves it is fine: a call-out is this much, a full job in a house this size is between these two numbers, here is what makes it more.
A large share of the phone calls you take exist only to ask the price. Putting a number up answers them without the call and filters out the people who were never going to book, so the calls you do get are closer to work.
If you genuinely cannot price without seeing the job, say that, and give the call-out fee and two real examples from past jobs. That is still more useful than "contact us for a quote".
How long: an afternoon
Step 6UsHave us build your site$99
We design and build the site, $99 one time, from the page of answers you wrote and the photographs you took. Three to five pages is the right size for a local business: what you do, the towns you cover, prices, who you are, how to reach you. If you already have a site, this replaces it, and the addresses people have already linked to are kept pointing at the right pages.
This is the only part of your presence you own, and the only one that can actually sell. It holds what a Google profile structurally cannot: your prices, a service explained in more than two sentences, your licence number, and the answers to the five questions that decide between you and the next listing. Being able to edit the wording of a site is not the same thing as the site being able to do that work. Where we could read yours, the line under this says what it is missing. Where we could not, judge it yourself: open it on your phone, press the number, and try to book a time without telephoning anybody.
After the build you pay the real running costs directly: a .com is roughly $12 to $20 a year and hosting is in the region of $5 to $30 a month. Check current prices, they move. A blog is not part of this and for a referral-driven trade it is not worth starting one.
How long: a week
Step 7YouHave one fluent speaker read your English, oncefree
Take the page of answers you wrote, your profile description and your site text, and have one person who speaks English well read all of it in a single sitting. A family member, a regular customer, a neighbor. Ask them to mark only the sentences that are confusing, not the ones that sound foreign.
An accent costs you nothing. A sentence a customer cannot follow costs you the enquiry, and you cannot hear which of your own sentences those are, because you know what you meant. This is an hour of one person’s time and it fixes the words on every page at once, since the same short set of sentences gets reused across the whole site.
Do not let them rewrite it into polished marketing English. Plain, short and slightly blunt is correct, and it is also how you actually talk. The only thing being tested is whether a stranger understands it on the first read. It sits here, after the build and after the widget, because it is a review pass over text that has to exist first, and because the same short set of sentences is what the chat will be repeating to customers.
How long: an afternoon
Not yet
Leave this aloneDo not translate the site yet
Hold off on a Spanish, Russian or Chinese version of the site until you can actually serve a customer in that language, by phone, by text or in person, every time.
A page in a language you cannot follow up in produces an enquiry nobody can answer, which is worse than no page. It also means the first impression a customer in that language gets of you is being ignored.
When you can serve that language, translate only the pages that lead to money, not the blog, and give each language its own address rather than a widget that swaps the text on one address. Unedited machine translation on a selling page reads as unserious. If the problem is the other direction, you serving English speakers, Smart Chat handles it without translating anything.
This is the general plan for Cleaning. The free check asks what you want more of and what you have now, and will read your own website if you give it the address.
The businesses listed under Cleaning are at /c/cleaning.
Businesses we built sites for
Real companies, real websites. Open them and look: that is the only way to tell whether anybody is actually behind this.
Most of this plan is yours and costs nothing. The steps marked for us are the ones we would do, and what they cost is written on them. Nothing here is an offer you have to take: the plan is the same either way.