Young cleaning service in Chicago wins Super Service award for the second year in a row
Chicago, 01-26-16 – Companion Maids, a locally owned, on-demand maid/cleaning service announced today that they have won the Super Service Award from Angie’s List for the second time in a row.
Donald and Thomas Spann, Co-Owners, have been Angie’s List vendors since August of 2014, and joined it as a way to expand their reach in the Chicago market. The company offers flat rate pricing by the bedroom for residential homes, and provide their own supplies and a satisfaction guarantee.
“One of the things that allowed us to differentiate ourselves in this market was the ability to offer simplicity,” said Donald, an owner of the company. “Many companies don’t show clear pricing, or require a site visit to give you a quote, but when you visit our page, you know what you’re getting, you know what you’re paying, and there’s no surprises.”
According to Donald and Thomas, Angie’s List has been a great avenue for Companion Maids. Angie’s List users pay a monthly or yearly fee for membership, and access to trusted Angie’s List vendors and reviews, so there is less confusion about phony users and reviews. The Super Service award is awarded each year to the top 5% businesses in each category, so winning this award twice was quite an achievement for the new company, which has been around for just over two years.
“One of the great attributes of a typical Angie’s List client is that they are typically more knowledgeable about what to expect,” Donald said. “We strive to maintain a certain standard, but when we do make a mistake, Angie’s List clients are more willing to work with us to allow us to rectify the problem and create a satisfactory cleaning experience.”
Companion Maids is one of a new wave of cleaning companies that offer on-demand cleaning services for Chicago residents. Companion Maids is one of few companies on Angie’s List that have won the Super Service award their first two years on the platform.
About Companion Maids
Companion Maids is Chicago’s premier local on-demand maid service. We fervently strive to remove the hassles and frustrations that come with traditional maid services. Book a cleaning on our website at a flat-rate in 60 seconds or less, using our simple booking form. Please visit: www.companionmaids.com to learn more about our specific services.
Companion Maids will be participating in a silent auction for an upcoming charity event benefiting research for bone marrow transplant. Dr John Galvin, Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Researcher at the Feinberg School of Medicine is leading a study on bone marrow transplant. The charity event, called Summer Lovin’ is hosted by the Auxiliary Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
The Auxiliary Board consists of young professionals with a focus on connecting professionally and benefiting others by continuing to support doctors and patients of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Since first becoming affiliated with Northwestern in 1987, the Auxiliary Board has contributed more than 1 million dollars to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Companion Maids is proud to be a Chicago cleaning service that can give back. As a small, growing company, we are just starting to explore ways to benefit the great Chicago community that has entrusted us with her business. To that end, we have donated over $450 worth of services to be auctioned off at the upcoming Summer Lovin event, with the winning wager going directly to Dr Galvin’s research.
Read more about the work of Dr Galvin and to make a donation to help support bone marrow transplant research, click here.
After another exciting year with Angie’s List, Companion Maids has received the Super Service award for the second year in a row! Since this is only our second year on Angie’s List, this is a heck of an accomplishment for us.
The Angie’s List service award is only awarded to the Top 5% of companies in a given market, and with over 1,200 cleaning companies in Chicago, it was quite an honor to receive recognition in such a competitive area!
Since we first listed our business on Angie’s List, the AL community has been a great experience for Companion Maids. AL has an incredible set of options for a business owner utilizing it’s platform. Through our amazing service rep, we were able to take advantage of opportunities such as:
Big deal offers
Storefront offers
Responding to reviews
An intuitive messaging interface
A robust profile customization area
What we like the most is that only reviews from paid members are displayed as a part of your overall rating. The rating algorithm for Angie’s List isn’t weird and hidden, as is the case for Yelp! So when we have a client that enjoys our work enough to post about it (good or bad!) as long as they are a legitimate AL member, we don’t have to sit around wondering if the review will post or not. I think this business model is a good one, as the fakes and phonies of the world usually aren’t ambitious enough to actually pay to post anything.
In addition to all of the good we have experienced with Angie’s List, we had a few challenges. We dealt with two different disputes this year, as a result of a few things. We were able to resolve both of the disputes amicably, and Companion Maids was able to learn from those experiences. In the future, we will be putting an emphasis on a strict hiring process, and being as thorough as we can in vetting our future employees before they clean a home on our behalf. Our amazing cleaners are the function of our company, so we need that function to be strong. We will always listen to our customers, the lifeblood of our business, about what we can do to improve, and act on it as soon as we are able.
There will always be things we will pride ourselves on doing well, but there are always things we can do to improve. This commitment to excellence is what I personally believe led to our receipt of this prestigious award. This year, our goal will be to continue to strive for excellence, grow with Angie’s List, and do what we can do retain this award for the work we do in 2016. Could a three peat be on the horizon? That will be up to our amazing cleaners, and our loyal clients.
So to Angie’s List, thank you! We appreciate the award!
With that said, since it’s the beginning of a new year, we will be writing a recap post soon! Stay tuned for that!
Cleanify was started out of Canada and has since expanded into several US markets, looking to be a destination for clients all across both countries to have their cleaning needs met.
Companion Maids has long strived to be a Chicago maid company that focused on providing innovative solutions for a good booking experience, while maintaining a high quality of work. Because of a shared desire to serve clients using 21st century technology combined with high quality workmanship, we felt that partnering with Cleanify was a home run for our company.
We are still a young company that has served Chicago since 2014. We utilize many different avenues of marketing and networking to get our brand out there, so we were thrilled when Cleanify reached out to us. We did our research on this company, and once we got a sense of the values they stood for, we knew that offering our services on behalf of this company would be a good move for us.
Working with Cleanify has allowed us to of course work with clients that we may not have worked with otherwise, while providing a more well-rounded employment experience for our cleaning technicians. While Companion Maids doesn’t book a tremendous amount of hourly jobs, all Cleanify jobs are booked on an hourly basis, so we were able to fine tune how to work with a system that assigns a finite amount of time to a cleaning project.
Our staff has learned to work more efficiently, and begin to focus on areas of emphasis as needed, rather than simply cleaning the entire home over the course of a variable time slot. Because we generally do flat rate pricing, we normally work until the job is done, not necessarily paying much attention to how much time it takes.
Clients do seem to enjoy the lack of hassle in terms of not thinking about whether the price is going to fluctuate, but not all clients need their entire homes to be cleaned. In these situations, an hourly clean is usually a better option.
Cleanify of course allows us to practice these cleans and again, become more well-rounded. One way in which we utilize our staff with Cleanify is to send cleaners that are relatively new with us, but that we’ve already gained a good relationship with.
The different format allows our intermediate cleaners to become more versatile, which allows our overall staff to better serve our clients.
We first began conducting cleaning appointments as a Cleanify partner in February of 2015, a little over a year ago. Since then, we have performed hundreds of cleanings for this company, and there have been very few complaints on either end.
Cleanify has done a great job in terms of keeping the lines of communication open and prompt, and Cleanify clients are well researched and understanding.
We have enjoyed the work we have done with this company, and we will continue to explore ways in the future where we can continue to serve the great community in which we live.
