Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning books jobs, maintains schedules for fast-growing franchise chain.
Owning a franchise should give the small business owner an unfair advantage over the competition. After all, that’s why they pay a franchise fee and agree to follow the franchisor’s guidelines, right?
Oxi Fresh President Jonathan Barnett, MBA agrees.
Since first launching the fast-growing Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning franchise system in 2006, Barnett has aggressively sought innovative ways to give his franchise owners a competitive edge. One of the most significant advantages of the Oxi Fresh franchise program is an ambitious in-house Scheduling Center that frees Oxi Fresh franchise owners from the burdens of answering initial phone inquiries, educating would-be customers, scheduling appointments, and having to maintain their customer databases all by themselves.
“Oxi Fresh franchisees focus on creating satisfied customers, not answering phones.”
According to Barnett, the Oxi Fresh Scheduling Center enables franchise owners to focus their energies on what drives their success: Providing superior carpet cleaning and excellent customer service.
Here’s how it works: When a prospective carpet cleaning customer calls either the local or national Oxi Fresh number, the call is then rerouted to the Scheduling Center at the home office. Calls are promptly received by specially trained representatives who are thoroughly trained on different carpet cleaning methods, carpet fibers, and chemicals.
According to Barnett, scheduling center representatives can answer customer questions professionally and thoroughly, and are specifically trained to explain the many ways the Oxi Fresh green carpet cleaning process is superior to traditional methods – and to those used by competitors.
When speaking with either new or established customers, the Scheduling Center representative references the appropriate franchise’s schedule and other detailed information via a powerful, customized CRM (Customer Relation Management) database that can be accessed by both franchisees and Scheduling Center personnel. The Oxi Fresh representative schedules cleaning appointments and assigns the jobs to the appropriate “techs,” (as the carpet cleaners are known). The Oxi Fresh franchise owner is automatically notified as new jobs are booked.
While Oxi Fresh has maintained its Scheduling Center since launching its franchise program in 2006, Barnett and his team are in the process of finalizing a major software and system upgrade that provides Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning® owners access to their schedule 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The schedules are updated in real time and can be accessed anywhere with an Internet connection.
For more information on the Oxi Fresh franchise opportunity, visit the Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning website.
5 replies on “Oxi Fresh Supports Franchisees With Central Scheduling Center”
I like seeing how Oxi Fresh continues to provide great support for it’s franchisees. Rather than making them schedule appointments for themselves or hire reps directly, Oxi Fresh instead pools its resources in order to better help the franchisees. This call center is a great way to save time and money for Oxi Fresh, as well as making money with each job booked.
And since all of the calls are coming into one location, it gives Oxi Fresh the ability to maintain brand integrity through consistent quality and messages. With reps answering in the same way each time, the name Oxi Fresh stays in the minds of listeners, and it will be the first thing they think of when they need a good cleaning.
Have a good one.
Another cool thing Oxi Fresh has done for it’s franchise owners is developing a marketing plan. Rather than just leaving new owners to twist in the wind, leaving it up to them to design, make, and send out marketing materials, Oxi Fresh has a marketing plan all set up. With pre-designed templates, established relationships and national accounts with major vendors, and a management team ready to help at all times, Oxi Fresh is ready, willing, and able to help out it’s owners find customers.
It’s really a great system.
But what about our cleaning system? Is it good? Well, the best way to learn about our system is to first know what it’s not. Oxi Fresh is not steam cleaning. We don’t depend on using large amounts of water in order to clean. Of course, even when steam cleaners use all that water – they’re not really providing a thorough cleaning. In essence, they’re soaking the carpet with large amounts of water and then they try to suck up dirt and water together.
They’re are a few significant problems with this method. The first is that when all that water is in the carpet, it can loosen up dirt – which is normally a good thing. The large amounts of water, however, means that the dirt then begins to sink down into the pile and pad of the carpet. This can make stains disappear on the surface, but over time the stains simply lift back up. Another problem is that all the water trapped under the carpet pad can increase the chance of mold and mildew forming.
A final problem with this method is that it can take 12-36 hours to dry. It greatly inconveniences the customer, since the water takes the home hostage for over a day. Of course, with Oxi Fresh, you have none of these problems.
Oxi Fresh is also not like most dry-cleaning methods – or as they are also called, “spinning bonnets.” You see, this method employs what is, in essence, a floor buffer with an absorbent pad attached to it. You usually see floor buffers cleaning hard surfaces, like tile, and they do a good job cleaning those surfaces. Unfortunately, though, when these machines are used on carpet, they aren’t nearly as effective as Oxi Fresh. Why?
The problem lies in the way the machine operates. The spinning bonnet scrubs downward, trying to break up dirt and stains so that the absorbent pad can take them up. And this can work, but it’s generally only effective on the top third of the carpet. Since the machine scrubs downward, it means that the carpet gets compressed and the pad can’t reach the lower levels of the carpet. The dirt and stains, at that point, are just pushed deeper into the carpet pile. Following the cleaning, the carpet generally needs to be raked back up, which begins lifting the dirt and stains back up.
With Oxi Fresh, though, you don’t have to deal with those problems.
Our cleaning system, unlike other methods, doesn’t rely on hot-water extraction or dry scrubbing. Instead, we begin by spraying the carpet with an oxygenated booster and encapsulator. The booster serves to break up the dirt and stains in the carpet while the encapsulator forms microscopic crystals around those broken up dirt and stains, making them easy to remove from the carpet. This is different then most steam cleaning processes, in that we rely on the booster to do the cleaning, rather than copious amounts of water. That way, the carpets dry in an hour, rather than a day.
Then, we go over with our machine that has dual counter-rotating brushes. Unlike spinning bonnets, these brushes don’t just scrub downwards. Instead, the brushes rotate up and into each other. That means dirt and stains are captured by the bristles and lifted up into the machine, removing them from the carpet. So with Oxi Fresh, the carpet dries upright and soft, rather than being compressed as it can be with many spinning-bonnet methods.
As you can see, the Oxi Fresh method is quite a bit different from what’s out there – and quite a bit better because of it.