An Ontario-based startup is reshaping the way the Commercial Cleaning industry monitors and reports services to customers.
How did a major player in the commercial cleaning industry eradicate customer complaints without having to do more in-person supervision? Check out what the team at Jani-King Ottawa has to say about the solution and its impact on the company’s business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJdu20_bFhk
In the fight against COVID-19, the Commercial Cleaning industry has carried out many of the precautions and measures to stop the spread of the virus, complying with even more rigorous procedures to save lives and keep businesses open.
Needless to say, no cleaning company wants its clients’ facilities to become a hotspot for COVID-19.
Leading players of the commercial cleaning industry are now exploring the possibilities of digital transformation to track, report, and assure cleaning services are properly carried out. From creating and keeping timestamped digital records of all services to assuring services are carried out in precise locations within a property, the implementation of new technology to this industry will bring safety to both customers and staff during the course of this pandemic and beyond.
That is exactly what the Ontario-based startup, Stratosfy, offers to their customers: a solution that enables new levels of visibility over their operations, with unprecedented accuracy when it comes to real-time reporting and the locations that cleaning activities are being carried out in.
Mobile apps and cloud computing are not always enough
In the last few years, the cleaning industry started adopting checklist and communication apps to improve customer experience and management capabilities. COVID-19 has accelerated the process of digitization, adding challenges to these systems as they are largely dependent on smartphone capabilities such as GPS.
This is where Stratosfy comes into the picture.
Stratosfy’s cutting-edge solution goes beyond the capabilities of cloud-based mobile apps by introducing wireless sensors to the mix — these sensors assure cleaning activities are carried out at precise locations within a property with accuracy and reliability levels that are not possible using only the smartphone’s GPS.
Designed with user experience top of mind, the solution’s sophisticated features have been combined with a friendly and clean-cut app, making it simple for workers to report their progress in real-time as the sensors automatically record their presence at predefined locations.
Why is Stratosfy Marker so different?
Different from checklists or task control apps currently available in the market, Stratosfy’s solution, namely Marker, uses wireless sensors to “pinpoint” the micro-locations that must be serviced.
These wireless sensors, combined with cloud computing and mobile apps will give commercial cleaning companies a new level of visibility over their operations.
- Micro-Location – this is the company’s silver bullet: instead of relying only on GPS to provide their customers with gross approximations of where the cleaning activities are carried out, Stratosfy uses wireless sensors to breakdown properties into smaller parts, according to the client’s needs. You can track services at any location within a property: from outdoor locations like flower beds to indoor locations like washrooms. The whole building can be segmented into individual service locations.
- Real-time reporting – Stratosfy Marker has a sophisticated reporting system that triggers configurable real-time notifications of activity progress that allows easy report sharing with customers
- Licensing and pricing model – Stratosfy understands that charging customers per user may discourage full adoption of technologies like theirs in the services industry. Smaller clients end up having their employees sharing credentials which causes a lot of problems regarding employee accountability, issues in payroll, and many others. Instead, Stratosfy takes into consideration company size and number of supervised locations which makes the solution much more comprehensive and cost-effective to their customers.
How it works
Stratosfy Marker is designed to be straightforward and easy to use. The concept is to pinpoint key locations within a property that require worker presence to carry out activities by placing their wireless sensors so staff presence can be detected and registered.
Workers receive their list of activities with details about the tasks (e.g. date, time, location) beforehand, in Stratosfy’s app; however, the ability to report on their work progress is only unlocked once they are onsite, within the range of a sensor.
Here is a step-by-step of how the solution is deployed:
1 – Wireless sensors are placed (“fixed with a tape”) across client’s offices or commercial spaces, in every area that needs regular cleaning (e.g. lobby, washrooms, workstations, elevators, and others)
2 – Download Stratosfy apps
3 – Managers assign cleaning tasks to workers
4 – When a worker is near a sensor it will sense and record the worker’s presence & activities in a predefined perimeter
5 – Managers and supervisors receive work reports and before, during, and after snapshots of the activities
6 – Cleaning activity history is available via the dashboard at any time, anywhere
What’s next?
Stratosfy is now focused on running pilot programs across Canada in other verticals such as Property Management. They’re also focusing on developing improvements for the product’s next releases that are coming in Q1 of 2021.
One-touch mode will be one of the new features soon to be released. With this capability, workers will only have to touch their smartphone once before starting their shift – avoiding the number of occurrences one needs to take out their phone per shift to further reduce unnecessary physical contact points.