Saturday, December 31, 2016

It's the Little Things That Matter — My Experience in Dry Cleaning

It's the Little Things…My Experience in Dry Cleaning Hell

My wife and I are high users of dry cleaning.  Having two professional jobs you tend to need your clothing cleaned on a frequent basis.  And given that, we probably have a higher than normal customer lifetime value.

And we’ll pay for service.  Unfortunately, we’re also very forgiving of mistakes and give people more chances to correct situations than we should.  Which leads me to my latest experience AND solution blog post.

We’ve had the same dry cleaner for probably 5 years or more.  We’ve suffered through damaged clothing, lost shirts, not having the dry cleaning picked up and delivered for 6+ weeks.  The last straw was an incorrect billing of $700.  This incorrect billing forced me to reconcile 6 months of billing — a 4 hour job.  End result, we owed them $100 for the last couple weeks of cleaning.  Having to actually “manage” my relationship with a dry cleaner is completely unacceptable

Enter the solution - Men’s Warehouse Cleaning Services (www.mwcleaners.com). .  I was amazed at how the dry cleaning service has changed for the better.  And although some of you might already be experiencing such service it was completely new to my wife and I.  Here’s what I found:

  1. Drive through lanes (3 wide) where an attendant will greet you and take your dry cleaning from your car and deliver it back to your car when you return.
  2. Professional attendants — who are courtesy, helpful and attentive.
  3. Frequent purchase programs — I can get a free shirt for every 20 cleanings of a shirt.  A great cross sell to get customers into Men’s Warehouse stores.
  4. Free plastic collar inserts — holy crap!  I loose those things all the time, so having these is fantastic.
  5. On-time pick up and drop off of dry cleaning.
  6. Quick service — 1 day max for anything.  In fact, the attendant asked me if I needed something even faster as they would get it done immediately.
  7. A summary of the billing and a quick review by the attendant of the invoice —ensuring it’s correct and that the number of items I brought in were what I was leaving with.
  8. The assurance that if anything was not perfect, I need to contact them and they’ll make it right.
  9. Altering service — yes you pay for this, but the attendant always mentions they’ll check for any buttons, etc. and alter those if required.  That saves me time and keeps me from having frustrations when I slip on a shirt.
  10. A clean retail environment.
  11. And higher prices.  Yes it costs more.  But, the price of the above services is worth it.  Service continues to matter folks.  And I continue to believe that the key differentiators with business is service and authenticity.  
  12. Online Account — holy crap I can actually get access to the status of my laundry, etc.  

Men’s Warehouse get’s it.  Provide great service, keep customers happy and do an above normal job of the core offering leads to a higher household lifetime value.

Scott



No comments:

Post a Comment