Your Cleaning Service Needs a Client Onboarding Questionnaire [Free Download]

Welcoming new clients to your cleaning business is both exciting and important. As they say, you never get a second chance at a first impression! 

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In the cleaning business, that first impression has three prongs: your pricing, your communication leading up to the first cleaning, and how good that clean is in the end. Repeat bookings and happy clients happen when you hit all three experience points on the head. 

One thing that can help make sure you ace client communications and your first clean is an onboarding questionnaire. In this article, we’ll chat through why a client onboarding questionnaire is essential to clear communications and how to customize yours for your business.

Why Client Onboarding Questionnaires Are Essential

We’ve all shown up to a first cleaning not knowing what to expect. Or, we’ve had clients call us disappointed that we didn’t perform a service they expected, even though we do not offer that service. Misaligned expectations like these are easily avoided with a client onboarding questionnaire. 

You likely already share things like contracts and guidelines with new clients when they book. This is the ideal time to send your questionnaire! 

Asking clients to answer a few questions about how you can best service them is the easiest way to avoid a mystery. Clients should expect that you’ll need to know about parking, for example, but they may not know that you need to know whether they have pets or if they smoke to provide an accurate, fair estimate. 

But onboarding questionnaires don’t have to be focused solely on getting the answers you need. Including a client onboarding questionnaire in your booking form helps you do three things for clients, too:

1. Set expectations for your first cleaning
2. Understand their needs
3. Establish a reputation for high-quality communications 

What other tool can achieve all that in one go?! Asking new clients to list their priorities lets them share their expectations while also knowing what falls out of your bounds. 

Free Client Onboarding Questionnaire Template

You can download this free, editable Client Onboarding Questionnaire template and save time by having a starting point:

How to Write A Client Onboarding Questionnaire for A Good First Clean

A good onboarding questionnaire should be detailed, but still easy for customers to fill out. Digital, clickable checklists are a popular option because clients can quickly read through a long list of options, checking off the ones they want as they go. 

A good client onboarding questionnaire should also offer clients a space to communicate what they need cleaned and verify whether you can provide the service they want. If you don’t offer move-in or move-out cleans, they can simply cancel the booking during the onboarding process, and you avoid wasting your time on a lead that wasn’t going anywhere.

Start off your questionnaire with your most important questions. Cover pets, children, parking, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms they have. Ask if this will be a move-out or move-in cleaning, which can (and should!) extend your time and fees. 

When you’ve asked all of the important questions you have, turn it over to them to share their expectations. 

Keeping checklists digitally makes it easy to manage communications with your technicians when they go out to do the cleanings. Rather than try to keep dozens of printed checklists in order and hand them out each day before cleaning techs leave, you can share cleaning checklists at the same time you do job details. 

List all of the services you offer. Be as detailed as possible. For example, the Kitchen section of an onboarding questionnaire could include:

• Oven (inside)
• Oven (outside)
• Wipe down countertops
• Sink (empty)
• Wash dishes / Load dishwasher
• Cabinets (outside)
• Cabinets (inside)
• Refrigerator (inside, empty)
• Refrigerator (outside)
• Dishwasher (inside, empty)
• Dishwasher (outside)
• Vacuum floor
• Mop floor
• Stovetop / Range
• Take out garbage

Listing only what you offer to clean helps clients understand what will and will not be touched during a service. If you do not clean ovens, don’t list either oven option, so clients can’t check it off. 

Client Onboarding Questionnaire vs. Cleaning Checklist

If you’re looking at the list above and thinking, “Hey, that looks a lot like my cleaning checklist,” you’re not wrong! A client onboarding questionnaire typically asks the essential arrival, departure, and procedural questions you need answers to when planning a clean. But if you extend that line of thinking to your client’s expectations about how much their cleaning will (or needs to) cover, adding the cleaning checklist to your onboarding questionnaire becomes a no-brainer.

Asking your client to check off what they need cleaned makes both your and your cleaner’s jobs easier. After a quick review, you can simply send the list over to your cleaning technicians at the appointment time. The customer gets what they need cleaned, and nobody is frustrated or disappointed.

While we recommend including the cleaning checklist in your onboarding questionnaire, there are certainly times when it can be removed from the initial questionnaire. Consider these scenarios in which you’d probably like to take a pause before committing:

• You’re at capacity and screening new clients before automatically accepting new jobs
• You’re expanding to a new area, but need to verify the new location fits into your current schedule
• You recently lost cleaning techs and need to rejigger your workload
• You’re leaving an area and letting go of clients there

Removing the cleaning checklist from the questionnaire at these times will pause the customer’s expectation that you’ll immediately respond, and allows you the space of an extra step before booking to make sure you’re ready to tackle the clean.

After the Clean: Client Onboarding Questionnaires as Receipts

Even with the best client questionnaire, the most prepared team, and the clearest communication, things happen. Clients don’t read, techs miss a check mark, and last-minute cancellations ruin your schedule. 

In these situations, and any situation in which a client is giving you a hard time about a policy they don’t like, your onboarding questionnaire can serve as a shield. Once a client has filled out a questionnaire, you can safely bring it back as a reference in times of frustration and to defuse an irritated client. 

If someone were to complain about a late cancellation fee, you can reference the onboarding questionnaire, where you asked them to check the box to acknowledge your statement about charging that fee. Better yet, if a client calls asking why their ceilings weren’t dusted, and they did not check off dusting services for any room in the house on the checklist, you can reference what they submitted in your checklist to verify their complaint. 

Automate Your Client Onboarding with ZenMaid

ZenMaid is the all-in-one software for cleaning service companies. With scheduling, credit card processing, payroll, and checklists, ZenMaid rolls together everything you need to run your maid service with ease. 

Digital checklists make onboarding new clients and employees easy, especially when it comes time to share job details with technicians. Simply share the checklist for a new appointment with the job directly when you assign it — and your tech is ready to go!

Deliver consistent results at every job, every day, with ZenMaid. 

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