New Year, New Beginnings – Partnering with Our Customers to Solve Their Cleaning Needs

By: Briana Smith, Social Media & Product Branding Specialist, WAXIE Sanitary Supply

The beginning of the year is often synonymous with fresh starts and new introductions, and this year was no exception.

At WAXIE, we value the partnerships we have with our customers, and oftentimes these partnerships require creative and customized solutions. We want to work with our customers so that together we can devise the best answer for their cleaning challenges to help them reach their goals – usually through a combination of logistics, organization and training with a comprehensive understanding of products, procedures and facility needs.

Building service contractors (BSC) have to work with these scenarios daily to assist their clients as well. WAXIE has the expertise and flexibility to help our BSC partners with their facility supply solutions. We can provide start-up support, as well as exclusive technology & analytics, training tools and a broad range of third-party ecolabel certified products so that you have everything you need to hit the ground running.

This New Year’s holiday was a big one for one of our BSC customers in the Pacific Northwest. They had just landed a large account and needed assistance preparing their account start-up for an official start date of January 1, 2015.

There was just one thing, all of the deliveries needed to be made on January 1st, a day that many businesses have off, including WAXIE. That’s why it was the ideal day for our BSC partner to get everything organized and prepped at their new account because the occupants of the building complexes that they would be cleaning at the beginning of the year would be out on holiday as well.

After understanding exactly what our BSC partner needed and the amount of work involved, managers at our WAXIE Seattle branch asked employees if anyone would like to volunteer to work the New Year’s Eve & Day holiday in order to make sure that we could fulfill the customer’s promise to have everything in place by the first of the year. Within five minutes, there were enough volunteers needed to complete this special request.

Over the course of the next two days, the volunteers put together three kinds of cleaning kits that would supply a large building complex for our BSC partner: janitor, porter and a restroom kits. We worked with the BSC customer to plan where all of the kits should go in each building, and arranged initial training for some of the tools they’d be using in sessions that’d occur after the delivery on the following Friday, Sunday and Monday after the first of the year. The BSC customer have their own internal training for cleaning procedures, but we also wanted to make sure that they were familiar with some of the new equipment color-coded wipers that they would be implementing.

WAXIE employees also created over 100 laminated wall charts, SDS binders with all of the cleaning chemicals that would be used to clean these buildings, as well as stamped all of their equipment with the BSC customer’s logo.

All of the hard work paid off. On New Year’s Day six of our drivers delivered a total of 16 truck loads (about 2-3 loads per driver) to the building complexes, working hand in hand with the BSC’s employees to unload and place the prepared kits where they needed to go.

Rick Jones, General Manager for WAXIE’s Pacific Northwest Region, commended everyone who helped pull this all together for our BSC partner. He particularly thanks Ben, Warehouse Manager – WAXIE Seattle, for putting in an extremely long days – not only helping with getting this project accomplished successfully, but for stepping in when our Night Crew Manager had to call in sick the very next day.

This was a remarkable team effort, but special recognition goes out as well to Vong & Nena for spearheading the logistics and making sure that we could fulfill our BSC partner’s requirements, the warehouse team for building and staging all of the kits. Corporate team members for giving up their holiday and flying in to help support both our efforts and our customer. The Customer Service team for putting together the 100 SDS binders and laminated wall charts. All our WAXIE Seattle-based drivers for giving up their holiday in exchange for a 12 hour workday. Reggie (in his first few weeks at WAXIE got indoctrinated in what customer service means to WAXIE) also manned the warehouse while the drivers were delivering the first load to stage the next truck load and to get a BBQ lunch ready for when they returned to reload. The Corporate Buyers and Eric Cohen for making sure we had all of the products in stock and ready for delivery. – Rick Jones

Our customer partnerships are very important to us, whether we’re helping a BSC with a new account start-up or a high school janitorial crew who needs gym floor refinishing training. We customize cleaning solutions to perfectly fit businesses just like yours making sure that you have everything you need. We can help our customers start a cleaning project any day throughout the year.

Getting started is easy – contact one of our Sanitary Maintenance Consultants or go to: http://info.waxie.com/get-started