Feedback & Pro Tips from Properly’s Trial Members
We’re developing the perfect tool to simplify guest turnovers. It’s a visual checklist app that utilizes the power of photos and the ease of drag and drop task pins to convey cleaning instructions and unique touches of hospitality to cleaners.
For the past several months, we’ve been running a trial with select hosts and property managers around the world to test our app, Properly.
Along the way our trial members themselves have come up with great tips that they have shared with us, so our intent is to share back by publishing our own tips to get the most out of the tool.
Superhost trial members like Tammi S. have given us feedback that makes all our hard work worthwhile.
Tammi rents her Seattle home on Airbnb, but travels frequently. When she’s off-site she depends on others to clean and prepare her home for guests.
Because the window of time between check-out to check-in and the availability of her contacts varies, she alternates between hiring cleaners and relying on the kindness of friends to help her set up her home.
After using the app for a few months, Tammi told us how Properly has changed her remote turnover experience,
“Guest experience is extremely important to me and I’m very particular about the setup of my home. When I travel, I am not able to manage turnovers myself and I used to worry that the quality would suffer.
Properly offers me simplicity and ease in what used to be a stressful situation. Even when I managed my turnovers on-site I would sometimes spend 30 minutes after the cleaner left to rearrange my home. Now I don’t.
I also love that I can be just as detailed and ensure guest satisfaction even when I’m not there. It’s great quality control.”
The cleaners who have tested the app with their clients reach out to let us know they like it too. Katia N. is a cleaning professional and has used Properly with two different clients who rent out their properties on home-sharing sites.
After one of Katia’s clients invited her to join the Properly trial to share instructions for a hospitality turnover, she was hired by another client who is a Properly trial member as well. When asked what using Properly during cleaning jobs meant to her, Katia told us,
“It’s not that I don’t know how to clean, I do, but I really like that it reminds me of all the tasks that need to be done. A final checklist is helpful for my job.
It’s also great that now I have proof I was actually there on time and finished when I was supposed to before the new guests came. Plus I was 100% sure I did my job exactly the way my client wanted.”
During this period, we’ve also collected a few creative tips from trial and team members to make the most out of the app’s features. In this post, we’ll share the first ones with you and roll out more later.
Pro Tip #1: Duplicate Jobs To Add Customized Tasks
Properly was developed to save hosts time explaining their intricate tasks to every cleaner who comes to their listing, and to offer cleaners unparalleled clarity of what their clients want during a job.
We’ve learned that many hosts and property managers spend years crafting the perfect pre-clean emails that describe all the specific hospitality touches, cleaning instructions, and supply locations any cleaner would need to know every time they came to that client’s property.
At different points in the year, some hosts would modify the list to incorporate compliance tasks like deep cleaning the oven every three months or changing the batteries on the smoke detectors every six months.
These periodic chores inspired the ‘duplicate job’ feature on Properly which allows hosts to copy an entire job and modify it with particular frames.
Hosts who want to build different customized jobs within the same property can duplicate the base job and add specific frames conveying the unique tasks for that particular cleaning.
Pro tip #2: Browse Previous Jobs & Verification Photos to Compare Cleaners’ Work
With the surge of on-demand cleaners flooding the housecleaning industry, it’s a reality that not all cleaners uphold a professional standard of work. Properly aims to equalize and elevate the quality of cleaning for every host who hires a cleaner for turnovers. Our tip is aimed at hosts who have used Properly with a number of cleaners.
Here’s what to do:
Browse through old jobs and verification photos to compare each cleaners’ quality of work visually. Then you can decide for yourself which cleaner you prefer to work with.
For example swipe through all the different verification photos for your task “Prepare a welcome basket with fruit and a bottle of wine,” and see which cleaner’s work you prefer. Using concrete visual proof to make a well-informed decision is just another way we want to create peace of mind for our hosts.
Pro Tip #3: Manually Prompt Cleaners to Report Damage
One group of property managers in San Francisco employs a third-party team of cleaning professionals to clean their listings during guest turnovers. To emphasize the ‘report a problem’ feature on the top right of the cleaner’s screen, the team devised a creative way that ensures cleaners are aware of and use the feature.
This type activity and feedback from our trial members makes the wheels in our brains turn. It inspires us to develop our tool better for the people using it. While we work on building a better version, we learned a new tip in the meantime.
The property manager imported descriptive photos entitled “Report Problems” in the Finish section of her workflow and added a task pin which cleaners would have to swipe through and check off during the job.
Here’s how to do it:
- Google a picture of ‘spilled red wine on a white carpet’ (or any other photo that conveys damage)
- Google a picture of ‘report a problem.’ The universal sign is the triangle.
- Upload them to the camera roll.
- Create a new frame in the job that you want to add this to.
- Import the the ‘spilled wine image’ as the focus for the frame.
- Tap, hold, and drag a ‘Look’ icon up to the top right corner, so that it’s near the cleaner’s ‘report a problem’ button.
- Press the edit pencil and add the following text: “If you want to report a problem, please tap this button on the top-right of your screen.”
- Then add the ‘report a problem’ photo into the task note, for extra measure.
With these tips Properly hosts can:
- Add intermittent compliance tasks and create customized jobs with very little effort.
- Visually compare cleaners’ to decide whom you prefer to work with.
- Emphasize to cleaners the importance of reporting damage for inventory tracking and auditing.
Visit Properly’s website to become an even better host with our tool for managing turnovers effortlessly, and follow us on Twitter for more home-share and vacation rental updates!
