How To Use A.I. in Your Cleaning Business

We’re at the dawning of the age of A.I., but unlike Aquarius, many are greeting it with anxiety instead of daisies! For many people, ChatGPT’s ability to write with superhuman speed and creativity feels like a direct threat to their livelihood and maybe even the future of authentic communication itself.

Unfortunately, just like with every leap in human technology, the business world is not willing to wait for everyone to work through their existential crisis before harnessing this new power as a market advantage. Simply put, the A.I. Arms Race is already underway, and companies that don’t learn to master ChatGPT or one of its competitors FAST will be left in the dust!

So many lifelong cleaning professionals falsely believe that professional cleaning is exempt from the tech revolution since cleaning is such an ancient profession. They clutch the old fashion notion that a warm handshake and some elbow grease are all they need to get by and avoid the wheels of progress.

In reality, the cleaning industry is in a constant state of technological growth in every aspect of the service, from chemicals to software, so cleaning companies that are unwilling to adapt are ensuring their own extinction. Customers are already expecting everything from online scheduling to automated billing to text reminders and more, so communications written with the polish of A.I. is the obvious next new demand.

Cleaning companies unwilling to adapt and upgrade their written output will stick out like a sore thumb in a matter of months!

If you want to keep the gears of progress from grinding up your cleaning business, it’s time to hop on the ChatGPT bandwagon… and we’re here to give you your first driving lesson! Cleaning industry expert, Melissa Homer, will teach you how to fuel ChatGPT with the right data to help with:

- - - customer communications
    - online reputation
    - employee training
    - operating your business

Becoming a ChatGPT Prompt Specialist won’t happen overnight, but with the actionable insider tips below, you’ll be miles ahead of your competitors in minutes.

Read Now: How To Run a Successful Cleaning Business

Contents

1. ChatGPT Fundamentals

ChatGPT is a cutting-edge artificial intelligence tool that has been loaded up with a dataset of hundreds of billions of words from a wide variety of text samples scraped off the internet in order to teach it how to write like a real human.

The results are truly shocking, allowing the system to pump out paragraphs of uniquely and beautifully written text with only a few words of prompting. With more detailed instructions (AKA prompts) and when fed specific writing samples to replicate, ChatGPT can mimic a wide variety of writing styles with eerie levels of accuracy and speed.

“Write a rap about ham sandwiches as if you were the perfect combination of Eminem and Dr. Seuss”

… no, really.

Now edit the prompt to say:

“Eminem and Shakespeare.”

While the result won’t blow up the charts, they will blow your mind with their speed, accuracy, and variation based on prompt details and at least give you a few solid chuckles. This entertaining exercise is a perfect display of ChatGPTs power and limitations.

At first glance, ChatGPT appears to be the perfect author that never gets writer’s block, never sleeps, and can speak eloquently instantly on infinite topics. At the end of the day, though, A.I. virtual assistants are still just computers, not humans, so to ape human behaviors, they have to comb through their data and write what seems to be the expected human response to your request.

The Human Element

ChatGPT can’t tell if its rapping is cringeworthy, even if it is perfectly rhymed and syncopated. This is the first big lesson of using A.I. Assistants. YOU have to bring humanity into the equation, filtering its artificial output through your own flesh computer (AKA your brain). Computers will never truly experience our emotions or real-life events and develop the hard-earned wisdom their combination creates. Your humanity is your job security if you do something meaningful with it to enhance the A.I. output.

Input Matters

The other big lesson is the better the input, the better the output. If you just entered “write a poem about sandwiches,” you would never get the writing style, topic specificity, or rhythm pattern you received when you entered the first prompt above. Learning how to write your prompts to request document type, writing style, intended audience, length, and subject matter will give you vastly more usable results.

Asking for “a casual customer email telling a long-term client ‘thank you’ for the ham sandwich they gave you” will generate wildly different results than the poem prompt above. A prompt asking for “a professional letter demanding payment of medical bills for food poisoning from the gifted ham sandwich,” while arguably more similar, will illustrate perfectly the importance of asking for exactly what you really want.

The final guiding principle is it’s ALWAYS easier to identify and enhance what you like or dislike from a set of choices rather than create from scratch. Ask ChatGPT prompts like:

- - Give me 5 creative ways to say X
  - List 10 topics to cover in my employee safety meeting at my cleaning company,
  - Write a list of catchy cleaning company brand names that focus on fast quality

This can break your writer’s block in seconds. Simply skim the results, and hit the regenerate response button a few times until something strikes your fancy or sparks your own human creativity.

Don’t let crafting the perfect prompt slow you down; just ask, read the response, then cut and paste the prompt back into the request box and, tweak it based on what you disliked, and try again.

Over time you’ll learn to ask for what you really want faster and faster. It just takes practice. To speed things up for you, we’ll spoon-feed you prompt tips for all the most likely cleaning business topics you’ll want ChatGPT to help you with.

2. Customer Communication

One of the biggest challenges for cleaning companies is writing polished customer communications. Cleaners must often broach delicate topics like apologizing for poor service, refusing to clean properties that are too unsanitary, needing to reschedule clients due to insufficient staffing, and more.

Making it even harder, many cleaning company owners have never received any formal training in business writing, and for some, English isn’t even their native language. Hardest of all, cleaning customers expect personalized responses to their concerns and respond viscerally to canned-ham auto-generated emails.

With ChatGPT, you can quickly and easily generate personalized messages that reflect your company’s brand, tone, and even writing style.

Many people do not realize ChatGPT can write in different styles if you ask it to play the role of a specific type of person or ask it to mimic the writing style of a sample of text that you provide it. Keeping a document of your most frequently used prompts and some short writing samples that you feel reflect your style is a true ChatGPT game changer.

Once you get used to it, you can get ChatGPT to write you customer emails, newsletters, brochures, social media posts, and more!

Here are the prompts you should try giving to ChatGPT to make it write customer emails for you that sound authentic, personalized, and well-written:

“You are playing the role of a warm, friendly cleaning company owner that writes to customers in a casual and authentic style. Write an email response to the following customer letter, letting them know you are sorry they are upset and are willing to reclean the parts of the home they are upset with.

<cut and paste customer letter here>"

“You are playing the role of a compassionate yet professional cleaning company owner. Write an email to a customer, letting them know you cannot clean their home anymore due to the unsanitary conditions your cleaners found at the last clean. Explain this work is beyond the type of work your company provides, and they need a restoration cleaning service. Please write the email delicately, so it does not insult or embarrass the customer.

<cut and paste the email you’ve written here>"

“You are playing the role of a smart and funny cleaning company owner. Write an email response to the customer letter below, mimicking the writing style of the sample paragraph below, telling the customer you agree to their request.

Sample Paragraph: <cut and paste the email you’ve written here>

Customer Letter: <cut and paste customer letter here>”

3. Online Brand Reputation Management

Another huge challenge for cleaning companies is managing their online reputation, specifically dealing with customer online reviews. With so many consumers turning to the internet to research cleaning companies before making a decision, a few bad reviews can seriously harm a company's bottom line.

Responding to all reviews quickly, politely, and effectively can not only take the sting out of bad reviews but can also even improve your search engine results as Google learns you are an active business it can trust to respond to its users.

Unfortunately, most cleaning business owners are too busy to write carefully written responses to their online reviews or lack confidence in their customer service silver tongue. As a result, they only manage their Google Reviews in fits and spurts, and bad reviews are left to linger, costing short-term revenue and long-term brand popularity.

ChatGPT can help cleaning companies craft responses that are both personalized and professional at blazing speed.

It is extremely important when using ChatGPT to write content like this to bring the human to the equation. It’s also critical to review the written responses for mistakes like describing unsanitary conditions in the home that A.I. might not realize is insulting or embarrassing for clients and other issues like that.

ChatGPT is improving all the time but is still prone to missing culturally sensitive references, things humans might be embarrassed by, and other nuances that require real human emotions.

Three Prompts to help you get started:

"You are playing the role of a professional cleaning company owner. Write a response to a negative customer review below, which was left by a customer who complained about the quality of the cleaning services they received. Apologize for any inconvenience caused and offer to make it right by sending your best cleaners to redo the job.
Customer Review: <cut & paste review here>"

"You are playing the role of a friendly cleaning company owner who values customer satisfaction. Write a response to the positive review below, which was left by a customer who praised the quality of the cleaning services they received. Thank them for their kind words, and let them know how much you appreciate their business.
Customer Review: <cut & paste review here>"

"You are playing the role of a confident cleaning company owner. Write a response to the negative customer review below left by a customer who complained about the price of the cleaning services. Explain the reasoning behind your pricing and offer to provide more detailed information about the costs involved if the customer would like to discuss it further.
Customer Review: <cut & paste review here>"

4. Employee Training

This one is a real game-changer. By now, you should have caught onto the theme, which is that ChatGPT can analyze a sample of text and then create a new document based on the style of the example. What you may not have realized yet is that you can finally create training instruction sheets, handouts, and other materials for your cleaners in moments instead of months!

Just as you learned above, your brain is far faster at identifying what you dislike about something that is already written versus starting from scratch. This means even if you currently have zero employee training written, just asking ChatGPT:

“Write an instruction sheet for a residential cleaner on how to clean an oven that includes simple numbered steps and a list of required supplies” should get you 80% of the way there!

Yes, the generic cleaning advice the A.I. gives won’t be the same as your company’s procedures, but correcting the text to make it reflect your brand’s practices should be pretty painless.

If you want to help ChatGPT write instructions that are closer to what you actually do, you can help it by giving some more details in the prompt, like:

“Write an instruction sheet for a residential cleaner on how to clean an oven using Easy Off and the Pumie.”

If you already have training sheets made that you wish were better, you can simply ask ChatGPT:

“Rewrite the instruction sheet below, making it easier to skim and understand. Instruction Sheet: <insert text here>” and then just plop your old text in.

If you have found an instruction sheet from someone else that you love, you can ask ChatGPT:

“Write an instruction sheet on how to <fill in the task here> mimicking the writing style of the sample instructions below. Sample Instructions: <insert sample you like here>”

And in seconds it’s as if you hired that great teacher to write your training too!

If you are not sure where to find instructions written in a style you like, feel free to use one of ours.

Also, feel free to use these techniques to make so much more than just cleaning instructions, as the same prompt style can be used to create Customer Service Training, Employee Safety Training, and so much more.

You can even ask ChatGPT:

“I own a small commercial cleaning business. I like to retrain my cleaner on important cleaning, customer service, or safety tasks each month at our company meeting. What topics should I train on this month?”

Then all you have to do is pick your favorites and ask ChatGPT:

“Write an employee handout for my cleaners on the topic "<insert favorite here>." This handout will be used for live training at my company's monthly meeting”

BOOM! Monthly Meetings Mastered!

Just remember, you still have to bring the human into the equation, so be sure to review and edit the document for accurate advice before you start presenting!

5. Business Operations

This last one is a quick but important one! Since you have already learned how to prompt ChatGPT to write things for you in a specific writing style, how to get it to edit existing work, and how to ask it to give you suggestions of topics to write about, you can now unleash this new tool on so many aspects of your business.

For example, if you use job tickets to track information on what services should be performed at each customer’s cleaning, you can ask ChatGPT to “Rewrite and organize the account notes below to make them easier to skim, using short actionable sentences written with bullet points. Account Notes: <insert text here>”. You can even provide a writing sample of well-organized and formatted Job Ticket Notes and ask the A.I. to rewrite your notes in the same style (feel free to use ours).

In seconds you’ve updated your account data, saving your business thousands of dollars in newly avoided mistakes due to confusing or missing customer information. If you want to get really fancy, you can even update your prompt to ask the A.I. to alert you which data is missing from each account as it updates. Just add the sentence “Insert the phrase ASK CLIENT TO UPDATE next to each section without relevant information available in the account notes below.”

Now, in a few minutes each afternoon, you can just cut and paste the perfected prompt and messy old notes to reformat the job tickets for the next day’s cleans, until all your clients are fixed for good.

Using A.I. in Your Cleaning Business Just Got Easier

You did it. At this moment, you probably know more about how to use A.I. than most small businesses in your market properly. From now on, you are only limited by your imagination and ability to identify which portions of your business could use some A.I.Assisting!

Ask ChatGPT either one of these:

- - - “Write a procedure for the customer service manager of my cleaning company on how to follow up with customers, collect feedback on their cleaning service, and act on it.”
    - “What are the most common tasks that small cleaning businesses fail to keep on top of?”
    - “Play the role of a cleaning business consultant and tell me what are the top three things I should focus on to increase the profitability of my cleaning company?”

Just remember to bring the human to the equation and fact check the output. But other than that, the sky's the limit. To A.I. Infinity and Beyond.

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Written by

Melissa Homer
Content Contributor at
Microfiber Wholesale

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Melissa Homer is a professional cleaning expert with over 20 years experience in the commercial and residential cleaning industry. She is a highly trained cleaning professional, business consultant, and educator that specializes in cleaning product testing and research, premium surface care, cleaning safety, cleaning procedure efficiency, training documentation, and cleaning damage repair. Melissa has worked for some of the biggest names in the professional residential cleaning industry, including P&G Professional and MaidPro. She has been interviewed and quoted in numerous leading publications such as Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Consumer Reports, Better Homes & Gardens, U.S. News & World Report, and The Washington Post.

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