Make no bones about it, Artificial Intelligence or AI for short, is here to stay. And despite being in a fairly traditional and “old school” industry, our Plano house cleaning business is using AI in a big way.
Here’s how:
Hiring
This is a big one and offers tremendous opportunity for our business as well as many other house cleaning businesses in Plano.
They say that in business, your most important asset is your people. And in the house cleaning business, like most industries, it’s really hard to find the right candidates.
We’ve started to use AI in our marketing outreach and also our new hire pre screening process.
First we built a machine learning model around her interests. We had to outsource a Python expert to analyze about 20 data sets including
- Children’s Ages
- Weekend Interest
- Restaurants and types of food they like
- Which schools their kids attended
- Which country they were from originally
From there, we built an avatar of our ideal candidate.
Using this Avatar, we deployed answerthepublic.com’s free tool to come up with content around 10-15 topics we decided on.
Here’s where it got fun:
After that, we loaded the content into a series of ChatGPT prompts that were tied to our social media channels (in this case Facebook and Instagram) to automate our content creation based on the query results from ChatGPT.
This took a programmer with Activepieces to automate.
Once we’ve identified our house cleaner candidates in Plano and got them to apply, we were inundated with inquiries and experienced alot of inefficiencies with screening candidates.
We decided to set up a chatbot on Whatsapp to prescreen candidates. Only the qualified candidates are engaged and invited to an interview. In the future, we can automate this process with an application such as Calendly.
Training and Certification
The implications of leveraging AI in training house cleaners in Plano is absolutely mind blowing and we’re still scratching the surface here at Dallas Sunrise Maids.
One of our biggest challenges with our new house cleaners is that many of them come from humble backgrounds. Sometimes that means that our candidates are not always literate enough to complete our certification program.
The easiest way to get around the literacy issue is to create video. However, professional video production can be very costly.
One way we’ve implemented AI here at Dallas Sunrise Maids is by rolling out a series of AI generated videos, all in Spanish using a platform called Synethesia.io.
The platform allows for audio as well as visuals, which help to reinforce important concepts, many of which are very specific to the house cleaning industry and our local Plano market.
We’ve also leveraged AI for quality follow ups during our certification process using Python, Tableau and the Google Suite which you can see more on below.
We’ve also been able to generate a few scenarios using image generation such as the Bing Image Creator in order to reinforce certain policies that are hard to create in a photo.
Quality Control
AI has also had a huge impact on our quality control process.
Because the Metroplex is so spread out, it’s nearly impossible for us to perform a quality check on every single home we clean in Plano.
That means that customer feedback, particularly from our regular ongoing house cleaning customers, is critical.
We also need to get quality feedback from our field inspectors to our house cleaners as quickly and efficiently as possible.
What most Plano house cleaning companies do is take the feedback in English and translate it to Spanish. Usually this is delivered verbally either in the moment or while during a meeting in the office at some point later in the week.
The challenge with this old way of doing things is that oftentimes the feedback is not retained and applied. Using AI, we’ve come up with a solution that is visual, practical, and scalable.
Our quality capture system starts with site visits. Any anomalies are entered into the back end of our Tableau dashboard manually using keywords. In addition, any client complaints that come in either by phone or email are also logged into the same spot.
The dashboard cross references the team with the client and pulls an image of the property off of Google as a reminder of what the property looks like so the cleaners can start to remember the home specifically.
That’s done via Python, Google Sheets, and Make.com.
The translation is done using Google Translate in real time and the results are displayed in a color coordinated, visually impactful table and serve to highlight any recurring quality instances.
This dashboard has had a huge impact on customer retention, referrals, and increased ongoing revenue for us as well as our house cleaners, who are seeing more tips as a result!
Customer Retention
This one’s pretty easy and most likely a number of house cleaning businesses in Plano are using a few of these tricks. If not, they should be 🙂
ChatGpt and Gen AI is a great tool to handle customer complaints and complicated situations. This is especially useful in our industry since at times the folks behind the keyboards are not native English speakers.
We’ve also found that Hubspot, our CRM, has some terrific email writing software that takes into account our “voice” and can rewrite mass emails quickly and effectively.
Getting a handle on quality issues using the dashboard mentioned previously has also helped us keep our ongoing house cleaning customers at a higher rate than we had prior to implementing the system.
Keeping cleaners with full schedules and happy clients has been a self reinforcing loop because customers are happy that issues get resolved and teams are happy that they have plenty of work.
Productivity
There are tons of AI tools for house cleaning that we plan on starting to use in the future as well as a few that we are using today.
Machine learning and image recognition software is in it’s infancy, but it’s definitely out there.
Applications like stain detection, material sensitivities, and best fit cleaning supplies are in the nascent stages of early adoption right now, but we’re trying to be on the forefront here at Dallas Sunrise Maids.
Breakthroughs tend to occur in more established industries, such as biology and medicine, so we’re always looking for tech solutions we can borrow or modify for our purposes.
Take, for example, stain detection.
Imagine being able to have someone who encounters a stain in the field being able to run that stain thru an app leveraging AI. That app would then give the house cleaner the ability to identify the stain, the material the stain is on, and the best product and process to remove said stain.
We’re currently tracking a company called Techcyte, a diagnostic pathology tool leveraging AI to detect certain parasites, bacteria, and other bloodborne pathogens in an environment such as a home or apartment.
The challenge is that these tools are expensive and not that easy to deploy in a non-laboratory setting.
That said, here are a few work-arounds and early adoption cases we’ve started to implement to increase the productivity and ultimately the effectiveness of our house cleaning company here in Plano.
We’re using Google Maps and Bard to optimize schedules, leveraging their map creation capabilities to create efficient and predictable routes for clients.
Besides the obvious uptick in efficiency, leveraging AI for house cleaning routes tends to create predictability for clients in terms of arrival times.
We’ve also started to use Generative AI, or GenAI for short, to answer basic client emails, new employee inquiries, and simple tasks such as schedule change requests.
As the technology improves, weve been able to better communicate with customers using a more authentic voice over time. This has been especially helpful for our office support staff whose first language is not always English.
The Future of AI in the Plano House Cleaning Business
There are a number of different kinds of Artificial Intelligence out there.
The component of AI that we are focused on is called Narrow Artificial Intelligence, or ANI for short.
This narrow scope, in our case focusing on the actual process of cleaning, is what has the most potential in our industry.
Companies such as Kibsi and Matroid are a few examples of the AI component known as Computer Vision. These focus on extracting data from video and could be leveraged to improve the cleaning process within a home.
The ultimate standard which we are always working towards is to take a data set that might include 100 homes, map out the cleaning process and supplies used, and generate results that will allow us to increase quality and efficiencies in both the cleaning process and the materials used.
Because of the variety of types of properties in the house cleaning industry in Plano, there are a myriad of sample properties that can be mapped and analyzed. These include apartments, one and two story homes, as well as commercial properties.
From there, you’ve got the possibility of wearable technology that can be leveraged to clean more effectively and more efficiently.
Sensory inputs such as smells and visuals could also be gathered from a wearable device while cleaning the house. That information could be gathered and processed in real time and sent back to the cleaner who can then implement suggestions based on what the machine is observing on the jobsite.
Sensitive surfaces such as natural stones or exotic materials would be instantly recognized and run against a database of available cleaning supplies, including common supplies that should be avoided on said surfaces.
There are also resource efficiencies to be gained by leveraging AI.
Namely in the selection, application, substitution and automatic restocking of cleaning products and equipments.
Future applications of AI in our industry could also include creating custom cleaning protocols. for unique situations such as allergies, immune deficiencies, and/or any other special needs that the customer may have.
Conclusion
It’s an exciting time for the house cleaning industry in Plano to be using AI!
The fact that our industry is generally slow to evolve means early adopters will see lots of potential growth if they are able to successfully leverage new AI tech.
Our company, Dallas Sunrise Maids, is dedicated to delivering a professional experience for everyone of our clients. And for that reason, we’ve chose to learn about, invest and ultimately deploy a number of AI solutions that may not have originally been intended for our industry.
This, of course, is not just to benefit the bottom line. In many cases, AI technology serves to train, protect, and ultimately lift up our house cleaners which are the true foundation of our success.
