CarpetBossPro Blog — Carpet Cleaning Software

Choosing Carpet Cleaning Software: Questions to Ask Before You Switch

Switching software is a real decision. Your customers, schedule and billing all move with it, and your techs have to learn it. The wrong choice costs months. The right one quietly makes every week easier. A short list of questions, asked before you switch, sorts out most options quickly.

Look Before You Leap

The demo approach in Testing Carpet Cleaning Software With the Live Demo Before You Sign Up works for any software you are considering. Click around a finished setup with these questions in hand.

Does It Understand a Carpet Job?

This is the first and most important question. Generic field-service software gives a job an address and a notes box. Carpet cleaning software should have a place for:

• The rooms and areas, stairs and hallways, or whole house
• Upholstery, area rugs, mattresses, tile & grout
• Add-ons like pet odor treatment, stain protector and deodorizer
• Square feet and number of rooms
• Carpet type and cleaning method
• Access notes: pets, gate codes, where to park the van, where to run the hose

If all of that has to be typed into a notes box, your techs will read a paragraph on every job, and nobody will be able to tell at a glance whether the hallway was included.

Does It Bring Repeat Customers Back?

Carpet cleaning runs on repeat work. Ask how the software handles a yearly or six-month customer. Does it know when they are due? Can you see due customers on a map so you can fill a day by area? Does a new job fill in from the last one at that house, or do you start from scratch each time?

A calendar with reminders is not the same as a Waiting List that shows every home that came due. See Yearly and Six-Month Cleanings: Setting Up Repeat Carpet Customers by Minimum Days for what good repeat scheduling looks like.

Will Your Techs Actually Use the App?

Ask what the tech sees on the phone. Jobs in route order? Navigation in one tap? The job details and access notes on the card? A carpet cleaning checklist? Photos? Payment at completion?

Also ask how it gets onto phones. An app that runs in the browser and installs to the home screen on iPhone and Android, with a company login and personal PIN, is easy to roll out. Anything that needs special devices is harder.

What Do Customers Get?

Customers should get reminders and alerts they choose, and a place to see their invoices, pay, update their card and request service. A live route map and before/after photos are a real plus for a trade where somebody has to be home and the result is the selling point.

How Do Estimates and Billing Work?

Ask whether estimates are built from your own service list and can be priced off rooms or square feet, whether customers approve online, and whether the approved estimate becomes the job without retyping. For billing, look for line items with sales tax, card on file, auto-charge on completion, online payment and past-due follow-up.

If you do commercial work, ask how a property manager with many addresses is billed. One monthly statement covering every address is far easier for them than a stack of invoices.

Texting, Setup and Price

Ask whether two-way texting is included and how many texts each plan allows. Ask how you get your customers in — a CSV import that places addresses on the map automatically saves a lot of work. And ask what it really costs, with everything you need included.

For CarpetBossPro, the answers are: plans are Start at $59/month, Pro at $89/month and Crew at $199/month, with 500, 1,000 or 2,000 texts sent and received each month; the tech app, customer app, Waiting List, dispatch, estimates and billing are on every plan; and every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with no credit card. It works in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK and bills customers in their own currency.

Who Owns the Customer Conversations?

One question owners often forget: where do customer texts and records live? If every conversation is on the owner's personal phone, the business depends on that phone. Software with two-way texting from the office keeps conversations with the customer record, so anyone in the office can answer and nothing is lost when a phone is replaced or an employee leaves.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Finally, ask what you need. How many vans will you run next year? Do you do commercial work, or want to? Who will do the scheduling? What frustrates you most today? The best software for you is the one that fixes that frustration first.

Then try it with a real day. A trial with your own services, vans and a handful of customers tells you more than any comparison chart. To see every CarpetBossPro feature in one place, return to the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning software page.