Josh & Connie Klopfenstein

How a Family-Owned Carpet Cleaning Business Used ServiceMonster to Save Time and Grow Into a Successful Cleaning and Restoration Company‍

Spot Out is a well-known floor care company in the Coachella Valley owned by Josh and Connie Klopfenstein. For almost 25 years, loyal customers have been trusting them with all of their high-end cleaning and restoration needs. Josh and Connie believe in offering only first class experiences, and they’ve made it their goal to set themselves apart from the competition by educating their customers with knowledgeable and informed expertise along with providing unsurpassed levels of thoughtful and personalized service.

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A Scalable Solution to Operating Your Business (Hint: It's not with pen and paper!)

In their early days as a family operation, Connie took over admin duties to help her husband, Josh, while he was moonlighting to start his carpet cleaning business. After some time, though, she found herself struggling with multi-tasking and the manual tasks involved with keeping track of new jobs and work orders - whether that was sending follow-up cards after each job or taking phone calls and booking jobs while at her kids’ baseball games. Doing everything with pen and paper was proving too chaotic and, as a result, this juggling left her with little faith that her current system of operations was a reliable one. The final straw was the one evening she forgot her business scheduling calendar at her daughter’s guitar lesson. Every record of the next day’s jobs and beyond disappeared in the blink of an eye! That’s when she knew things had to change and that she needed a way to reliably keep track of things. 

Josh and Connie began looking for a business solution. ServiceMonster was the easy choice to help automate all those tasks that Connie was previously completing by hand. They could stop relying on physical invoices and job folders to carry to each job, and Connie could stop having to rely on a calendar notebook to write down each client that needed to be scheduled. With ServiceMonster, Connie could now easily handle work orders and scheduling from her phone - all while still balancing life with kids and raising a family. Now she can schedule jobs from anywhere like a pro!

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One of the Best Things You Can Do for Customer Retention

Besides reducing the chaos and clutter of pen and paper work orders and scheduling, one of the big things for Connie that set ServiceMonster apart from other service business software was FillMySchedule (otherwise known as FMS), ServiceMonster’s in-house automated marketing feature that sends out stamped, addressed high quality thank-you and follow-up cards to clients. Connie was already sending follow-up cards as a way to stay true to Spot Out’s ’old-fashioned service experience’ because it added a great personal touch and was a way to show appreciation for their customers’ business and loyalty. But instead of writing and sending each one by hand, now she could send them out with just a few clicks. And clients loved receiving them! 

For Spot Out and other companies, FillMySchedule is an excellent way to show how much you value your customers, as well as a great tool to get repeat business. If you want to read more about how a vast majority of ServiceMonster users have had their biggest growth and customer retention by using FMS, go here.

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Be More Efficient and Manage Your Time Better

During Josh’s early days working as a delivery driver, time and efficiency was drilled into him. Subsequently, he carried this work ethic into his own business practice. So it was important to Josh that he be able to get the most work done in the shortest amount of time, and for the quality of client that he had. Introducing a software to do the things that he and Connie couldn’t - or didn’t want to - do themselves was key to keeping them professional and efficient.

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Know Your Business To Make Better Informed Decisions

As a budding young business owner, Josh also understood there were certain aspects of his business that were still unfamiliar and new, like bookkeeping. With its QuickBooks integration, ServiceMonster helped him get a better grasp of where his company stood financially. Also, being able to see and track reports of his business progress helped him to make better informed decisions, such as being able to identify which clients brought the highest ROI and which ones who might not be the best fit.

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Keep You and Your Employees on Track

After a few years, Josh and Connie were able to expand their business and hire new employees. For a long time, they were using route packets and handwritten invoices with job folders containing each client’s necessary paperwork. Just this year they went mobile using ServiceMonster! Now, both they and their techs are able to have visibility and tools from their mobile devices. Josh and Connie can see how far away techs are from the next job, and their techs are able to do a variety of things right in the home, like quote and collect payments.

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Make Difficult Estimates Easy on Techs

ServiceMonster also allows for pre-filled pricing menus within the CRM, which Spot Out techs could refer to and quote with. This took a lot of stress and fear away from techs having to present high priced ticket items to the client, while allowing them to be consistent and build credibility.

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Make Your Life Better with a Service Business CRM 

Adding ServiceMonster as their customer relationship management tool has helped Spot Out be more professional, more efficient, and to keep their highest ROI clients. Their goal of running a successful cleaning business while managing a family is now simpler than ever. As a result, they’ve even been able to make more time for themselves and expand their business to hire employees.