Is Your Cleaning Business Smartphone Ready?

The Ask a House Cleaner Show and Podcast with Angela Brown

Is your business smartphone ready? Smartphones are everywhere today, so it's important in your business to be easily accessible for phones.

Is your business smartphone ready? Smartphones are everywhere today, so it’s important in your business to be easily accessible for phones. No matter what your business is, you have to make sure that you’re user-friendly for smartphone users; here are the reasons why.

Listen: Is Your Cleaning Business Smartphone Ready?

Watch: Title of The Episode with Keywords Goes Here

Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.

Is Your Cleaning Business Smartphone Ready?

Is your cleaning business smartphone ready? That’s a question that we all have to ask because right now, lots of people are using their smartphones to access the information that we provide on our website. So the other day I’m sitting in a car and I was waiting to be called in for an appointment.

And as I was sitting there, I was going through my smartphone and I was taking a course. Now, the side note to the course is that it’s from Savvy Cleaner training, which is a company that I own.

This is quality control. And I’m taking the course that I created on a smartphone and I wanted to see how user-friendly it was.

My Website Wasn’t User Friendly on Mobile

And it wasn’t user-friendly at all. Okay, now here’s the catch. When I’m creating a course, I have four laptop computers on a desk. They’re all doing different things, but they’re all in landscape mode.

So that’s 1920 by 1080, right? That’s like a smartphone turned sideways except it’s a much larger screen. And that’s how I see the courses we present to you. So, now I’m on the phone and the phone was turned sideways in portrait mode and I’m using my fat fingers and I’m trying to take the course.

And I got mad at myself because it wasn’t easy to do. Now, we are the easiest training program on the planet for house cleaners and I couldn’t even use my smartphone to take the course.

The Course Kept Kicking Me Out

Now, I got through a lot of it, but one of the challenges I had was we provide for you to make your lives easier, a bunch of resources. And so I clicked on a resource and it bumped me out of the course and somewhere else on the internet that I had linked to. Then when I tried to get back to the course, I couldn’t.

So I had to go type in the URL again, I got to the magic page of the course and it asked me, can you give me your email address? Can you give me your special password?

So I started going through the course and I clicked on something that was another resource and it bumped me out of the course again. And I was like, oh no, that did not just happen.

I Couldn’t Figure Out What Was Wrong With My Website

So then I had to log back in and log in with email, log in with the URL and the special passcode, and all that stuff. And it got back into the course and yay, I’m going along just fine. Then I click on something else and it bumps me out of the course again. I’m like, what on earth?

Well, I know how links work. You click on something, it takes you somewhere else, but I never figured out how to get back. So now I’m on a smartphone and I’m wigging out because I don’t know how to fix it.

I started thinking, I need one-click access where I click on one button and I’m back inside the course. I don’t want to have to keep logging back in, that’s super annoying. That happened to me like 20 times. I was so unnerved when I got into the appointment and I was only mad at myself. This is completely my fault. I’m the business owner, I should know better.

I Decided I Needed an App for My Business

So I decided as I was in that appointment, I needed an app. I need an app for the courses. I need an app. So I went home and we immediately went into action and we created an app. It’s now available on iOS and Android. I know, super exciting.

So here’s the thing, along with the app, I had to say to myself, how do people use our website? What do they need to see? And so for the courses, one click and you’re back into the course. And once you’ve logged in with your email and your passcode, it automatically remembers you.

So if you are in the middle of a course and it drops you off for some reason, or you run into the store or you move on and you leave it. When you come back, one click and you can pick up exactly where you left off.

Think About Who Uses Your Website

So I’m super excited about that. But back to the original question, is your business smartphone ready? So who else uses our website? One of the interesting things is one of the areas of Savvy Cleaner is we give away a free T-shirt every day.

It’s G-rated and family-friendly. And we have lots of people that want to win one for their house cleaner as a gift. So you can either buy them on funnycleaningshirts.com or you can register to win one every single day. And every day we give out a new design of the day.

You Can Register to Win a Free Shirt on Our App

So I was like, wait a second. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we put the funny cleaning shirts app on there so that people could register every day right from the app?

The app is free, it’s called Savvy Cleaner. And again, it’s available on Android and iOS. But now you could just register to win a free T-shirt from that app one click and you’re in. Yay, I love it.

We Also Have Links to Recommended Products on the App

So another thing every single day, I get asked dozens of times a day, where do I get that drill bit brush that you recommended on one of your YouTube videos. And we have to stop and we have to go look up that URL, we try to link it and we try to be as kind as we can. I will share a secret with you. We leave all the links to every single show.

So you can find those in the show notes, but we stop when we try to answer those questions. So I thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if we just linked to our Amazon store on the app? You can link to the app, you can go to our Amazon store. There you can find all the things we’ve recommended from drill bit brushes to cleaning chemicals, mops, brooms, and uniforms.

Everything that you need to run your cleaning business and clean your house, it’s right there on the app. Of course, our YouTube channel is on there as well. You can watch the latest update from every day on there.

Many People are Using Your Website On Their Phone

Now, the reason I ask if your business ready for smartphones is this, many people and a lot of people that are in our Savvy Cleaner network program, don’t even own a computer they’re on their smartphones. And they’re being so kind to me that they never told me, this is one of the worst user experiences that I’ve ever had.

It keeps bouncing me out and I can’t get back in and I have to keep logging in and I got fat fingers and it’s hard on my little phone. I don’t like this user experience at all.

There’s not one person that came forward and said, “I hate this user experience.” And I was in my car on my website and I was the one that said, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe this is what we provided to you.”

And I stand here, embarrassed. I’m ashamed. I wish I knew technology better than I do but I realized at that moment this is not fun. I do not like to keep logging back in again and again and again.

Our Free App is Available in 175 Countries

So one of my most joyous moments is that we did create an app that is available to you and it is free. Another thing that’s super cool is we are now available in 175 countries because of Android and iOS. And so it’s another way for us to promote you.

So, every day one of the biggest questions we get, I get hundreds of questions from homeowners. They say, “Can you recommend a person that’s gone through the Savvy Cleaner training that lives in my area.”

Here’s what we started doing. We have a newsletter that comes out once a week called it New Stuff and it shares all the new stuff that happened during the week. And all the different people in our network that I went through different courses.

Our Newsletter is On the App as Well

It shares all the different things that they’ve been through. And so along with that, it has their name, it has the name of their company that is hyperlinked back to their website. It’s got the city that they live in and the state or the area.

We’ve got people now all over the world that are on that list as well. So every single week, and this is on the app. So every single week you can see the new people of the week that are in your area. Now you can click on that link and say, “Oh, look, this is a Savvy Cleaner trained professional that I could have come to clean my house.”

So it is another way for us to help you, even if you’re the general population and you just download the app because you want the free T-shirt of the day, or you want to find out who went through the courses of the week.

How We Made Our Business Smartphone Ready

So I just wanted to share that with you. Our business had to take some huge steps to make sure that everything was smartphone-ready. We even changed columns around so that when you click on the thing, it doesn’t break it up.

We had stuff that was broken up and it looked pretty on a page. But when you go to smart, it chunks it like this. So it’s in a vertical line. And then we had stuff that was out of sync that didn’t make sense. So we had to go back through and rearrange a whole bunch of stuff so that it is smartphone-ready.

See if Your Website is Smartphone Ready

So my question to you, maybe you don’t need an app, but maybe you have users that are using your website in a way that is not user-friendly to them if they are on a smartphone. So I want you as your assignment to go back to your website on a smartphone, not a computer, not a desktop, not a tablet but a smartphone.

I want you to go through all the different pages of your business. And can you read everything and does it make sense? And is the font big enough? And did you use the right kind of font? Do you have the right kind of background for the letter of text that you’re using?

There are a Lot of Things No One is Telling You

There are a lot of things that no one is telling you and they won’t tell you because they like you. But when you go on it and you try to use it as a user experience, you’re going to say, oh my goodness. And then you’re going to go and you’re going to try to reinvent your website so that it’s future-proofed for your business. So my question to you, is your cleaning business ready for smartphones?

If you’re like me and the answer is like, ah, I don’t think so. Now, it’s time to stop what you’re doing and go fix it. Go fix it.

The world is moving to smartphones even mom and dad now are getting smartphones. So no longer can we pretend like it’s a fad that’s passing. It’s not going away.

Resources

Savvy Cleaner – https://savvycleaner.com

T-Shirt Giveaway – https://funnycleaningshirts.com

Android | Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.savvycleaner

IOS | Apple Store – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/savvy-cleaner/id1557308466

Mobile design: How to design responsive websites and mobile apps that work – https://amzn.to/33q7iEx

Build a Responsive Website with HTML and CSS: Step-by-Step Instructions with Practical Example – https://amzn.to/3hdQzwg

How To Get To The Top Of Google in 2021: The Plain English Guide to SEO – https://amzn.to/3bgIrXQ

The Psychology of a Website: Mastering Cognitive Biases, Conversion Triggers and Modern SEO to Achieve Massive Results – https://amzn.to/3hcb6kI

Get Free Website Traffic: the secret formula in 2021 – https://amzn.to/2Su4kwi

Permissions To Share

You Have Our Permission To Share This Episode