Customer service is a vital part of every business. Putting customers first, providing exceptional service, and building relationships will help cleaners and maintenance managers better manage their businesses.

As part of a recent customer experience summit led by GP PRO, Kimber Shray, the company’s vice president of marketing, moderated a panel discussion on being customer-obsessed. The following are excerpts from her discussion with Alec Fomin, director of member experience with Sage Realty, and John Sutherland, vice president of sales and marketing with Paramount Building Solutions.

Can you tell me how you define what it means to be customer-obsessed?

Sutherland: As a BSC, everyone is our customer, from the building owner to the property manager to the tenants to the visitors. When I think of being customer-obsessed, I think of the goal we have to have a partnership with every individual customer so that each one feels we are meeting their individual needs. Being customer-obsessed means never waking up to find out that we didn’t deliver, that we didn’t do what we said we were going to do.

Fomin: At Sage, we approach customer service from a hospitality mindset whereby we understand that our tenants’ loyalty is earned by how satisfied they are with their experiences with our brand. Being customer-obsessed means holding ourselves accountable as a brand to ensure that every decision we make deepens our engagement with our tenants and improves their overall satisfaction with our properties.

What role, if any, does your company culture play in customer service?

Fomin: To me, our culture is directly tied to our brand. It’s what we stand for, what we believe in. And in our business, we have to ensure that our employees embrace and live our culture so that our tenants experience it and benefit from it. Certainly, that involves hiring the best people and providing consistent, ongoing training to ensure that every employee approaches their job with the customer in mind. But it also includes putting ourselves in our tenants’ shoes. What’s their first impression when they enter one of our buildings? Are our buildings approachable? Do our tenants feel cared for? I tell all of our employees that if they aren’t curious about our customers and their experiences then they won’t be able to deliver products and services that exceed their expectations. You can’t have the latter without the former.

Sutherland: Culture is a major challenge for us because our employees are at different customer sites, each with different cultures of their own, different expectations of our employees, and some of our employees are working overnights. But it’s critically important to our success that we have a clear culture, that we bring it to every site, and that we integrate it into every customer engagement. We do that by approaching cleaning as a facility amenity, like a fitness center or a daycare, meaning our employees don’t just clean the facility, but they serve our customers. If a customer walks into their facility in the morning, and it’s clean, it smells clean, there are no fingerprints on the elevator buttons, and the trash is empty, that provides the customer with a level of comfort and reassurance.

How do you measure if your employees are living your culture and are being customer-obsessed?

Sutherland: We get very clear with our customers about what they want to achieve, and then we develop KPIs with input from our employees. And these KPIs involve leveraging our culture to help our customers achieve their goals. That’s the only way we can provide that amenity-like service. If I walk into a customer site at 11 p.m., and I ask one of our employees what our KPIs are, they should know. If they don’t, then we didn’t do a good enough job training them on our culture, and we didn’t get their buy-in into what they’d be measured against. That’s actually what keeps me up at night. Worrying if every one of our employees feels like they have skin in the game.

Fomin: We focus on our individual business units and indexing and comparing their performance. We look at everything from friendliness to cleanliness and productivity scores. If we see one business unit not performing relative to the others, we know that’s an area where there may be some customer dissatisfaction, whether we’ve heard about it not. And if we see a business unit that is significantly overperforming, we dive into what they are doing that we can bring to the other business units. If our employees are living our culture, there really shouldn’t be a lot of variation from one business unit to the next.

How do you maintain your culture in an industry with such high turnover?

Sutherland: I think we’re bucking the trend, but at Paramount, our culture is the primary reason we don’t have high turnover. I actually have a wait list of individuals in our markets across the country who want to come and work for us. It’s not about the pay, and it’s not about the hours. It’s about the culture we’ve created and people wanting to be a part of something that is positive and that positively impacts countless others.

Fomin: Absolutely! I can say the same for Sage. We can’t delight our tenants if we aren’t first delighting our employees. And that hospitality-based culture and brand not only helps us attract tenants, but it helps us attract and retain employees.

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What role does smart technology play in helping you be customer-obsessed?

Fomin: Nine months ago, we rolled out smart restroom technology across our entire six-building portfolio, incorporating it into more than 400 restrooms. Almost immediately, we started realizing all of the obvious benefits of reduced product outages, improved sustainability outcomes, labor savings, and a line of sight into tenant traffic patterns. And there’s no question that these benefits provide a real ROI for our tenants. But I had no idea that the data we receive could also give us such insight into our employees, their behaviors, and how they’re delivering our brand promise to our tenants every day. John mentioned earlier what keeps him up at night. What keeps me up at night is trying to figure out how I can make our brand promise more explicit to our customers, and I have no doubt that smart technology and the analytics it provides, whether it’s in the restroom, food and beverage, or other operations, will help me do that.

Sutherland: A little over a year ago, we took on a new customer that had a Kingsley satisfaction rating of 3 out of 5. That basically means that the tenants in the facility were really not happy with the space. But we helped the customer implement smart restroom technology, and in eight months, the Kingsley rating jumped to a 4.5 and then a 4.7. Now those ratings aren’t just based on the restroom experience, but smart technology in the restroom empowered my employees to perform additional higher value tasks. They learned the technology and how to interpret the data so they could deliver a better customer experience. Not just in terms of saving time and money, but in terms of making sure their cleaning efforts were, in fact, an amenity for that facility and the people who worked and visited there. Smart technology is making us even better. It’s helping us deliver on our brand promise in ways we never dreamed possible.