Invest in the quality experience

7th of December 2018 Article by John Griep
Invest in the quality experience

The fact your office is technically clean says nothing about how users experience the cleaning quality. As a cleaning company, you can offer a service that goes beyond simply cleaning an office. You can increase the quality experience and add real value, writes John Griep of VSR.

Being a cleaning association, we have focused for many years on measuring technical cleaning quality. Our name, Vereniging Schoonmaak Research (Association of Cleaning Research), is no coincidence. Our quality measurement system, VSR-KMS, determines whether the cleaning carried out meets what is agreed in a contract. How many fingermarks are there? How much dust? VSR-KMS is an objective, independent, scientifically-based and replicable measurement system. It’s applied on a daily basis in the Dutch cleaning market.

Entirely different is the ‘quality experience’ angle of cleaning. In which case it is not about whether something is technically clean, but whether the user experiences the area as clean.
This means in a train carriage the cleaning company may satisfy the terms of the contract; yet a train passenger may not feel it is clean. The transport company believes it has done a good job in managing the cleaning, yet the customer remains dissatisfied. Quality experience is therefore essential to customer satisfaction!

VSR once tried to create a system to measure the quality experience. This attempt failed, because – what only became clear during the process – you cannot influence variables such as a bad mood and bad weather.

Now, together with Dr Engineer Iris Bakker, we try again. Bakker connects knowledge (and measurements) with feelings, in relation to building design and maintenance. She is a scientist in this domain. Her presentation, during a general meeting, was a great success among our members. It motivated us to reinvest in research into the quality experience. And this has resulted in the course: ‘Quality experience indicators, a course for cleaning employees’.

What do cleaning staff learn? It has been demonstrated that the physical environment affects the total performance of an organisation. Its influence lies in sensory information received by each user of the building via 12 senses. Cleaning staff are in and around a building every day and also experience the effect of these 12 senses. They experience the culture and how the environment is used. They see what goes on behind the scenes.

By knowing about such senses, the cleaner can contribute in a useful way to the overall quality experience in the workplace, beyond their regular cleaning.

In a course lasting less than a day, cleaning staff learn exactly what the senses reveal and how to apply such information. Using a simple tool, the quality experience indicator, the cleaner learns what to watch out for in order to improve the quality experience.

A win-win situation, because it helps to ‘derobotise’ cleaning work. The cleaner personally adds to the improvement of the overall quality experience and in this way helps to boost customer satisfaction scores. This transforms cleaning from an expense into a service that adds value.

Our Partners

  • ISSA Interclean
  • EFCI
  • EU-nited