WindowBossPro Blog — Recurring Cleanings

Using Quarterly and Storefront Tags to Run Recurring Window Cleaning

A few dozen customers fit in your head. A few hundred do not. Once a window cleaning company has a real mix of storefronts on monthly service, quarterly homes, twice-a-year homes and one-time spring cleans, you need a fast way to find each group. Tags are that way. They are simple labels on each client, and they turn a long client list into something you can actually work with.

What Tags Are For

Reports on your recurring business, covered in Reports on Recurring Window Cleaning Customers: Knowing What Your Plans Are Worth, depend on clients being labeled in a consistent way. Tags are how you do that.

In WindowBossPro, every client can carry tags, along with custom fields if you need more detail. Tags do three jobs for recurring work: they help you filter, they help you message the right people, and they make reports mean something.

A Simple Tag Set to Start With

Do not overthink it. A small set of tags, used every time, beats a big set used now and then. Many window cleaners start with two kinds of tag:

• Kind of customer: Residential, Storefront, Commercial.
• Kind of plan: Biweekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Twice a Year.

Then add a few for the sales side:

• Spring Clean plus the year for one-time customers.
• Offered Plan for customers who said “not yet.”
• Cancelled plus the year for former plan customers.

A quarterly homeowner might carry Residential and Quarterly. A coffee shop might carry Storefront and Biweekly. A property manager might carry Commercial and Monthly.

Tags and the Plan Itself

Tags label the customer. The plan itself is the minimum days between visits on each address — 14, 30, 90 or 180 — and that is what makes cleanings come due on the Waiting List. Keep the two in step. When you move a customer from twice a year to quarterly, change the days between visits and swap the Twice a Year tag for Quarterly at the same time. Otherwise reports and filters will tell you something different from what the route is actually doing.

A client with several addresses can have different plans on each address. For those, a tag like Commercial on the client plus the plan on each address works well.

Using Tags to Build Routes

Many companies run one van on residential work and another on a storefront route. Tags make it easy to see each van's work on its own. When you look at what came due on the Waiting List, focus on Storefront clients to build the storefront van's days and Residential clients to build the residential van's days. On the dispatch board, filter by van to check each one.

Tags also help when something goes wrong. If rain wipes out a day, you can quickly find every Biweekly storefront that needs to go on the next route, since a short cycle cannot wait long. For more on that split, see One Van on Homes, One on Storefronts: Routing Recurring Window Cleaning Plans.

Using Tags to Send the Right Message

Not every message fits every customer. A spring offer for homeowners means nothing to a monthly storefront. A note about holiday hours means nothing to a twice-a-year home. Tags let you pick the right group before you send anything:

• Text Spring Clean customers in late summer to offer a fall visit and a plan.
• Email Quarterly customers about adding screens and tracks in the fall.
• Text Cancelled customers in early spring with a win-back offer.
• Let Storefront customers know about any holiday schedule changes.

Two-way texting from the office keeps each reply in a thread with that customer, and your monthly allowance of 500, 1,000 or 2,000 segments sent and received on Start, Pro and Crew goes further when you only text the people a message is for.

Keeping Tags Clean

Tags only help if they are accurate. A few habits keep them that way:

• Decide on the exact tag names once and write them down. “Quarterly” and “Quarterly Plan” are two different tags.
• Tag every new client when you add them or convert their sign-up from Form Responses.
• Update tags whenever a plan changes or a customer cancels.
• When you import clients from a CSV, add tags as part of the cleanup.

Labels That Do the Sorting

Tags are the simplest tool in WindowBossPro and one of the most useful for recurring work. A handful of labels, used every time, let you build routes, send the right messages and read your reports without digging. For the full set of recurring tools, from plans to monthly statements, visit the recurring window cleaning software page.