Communicating with Your Professional Cleaner
The quality of a recurring professional cleaning relationship in Ontario depends significantly on communication. Here's how to set it up for success from the beginning and manage it ongoing.
At Booking: Set Clear Expectations
- Pets: Disclose all pets — species, number, where they'll be during the clean
- Priority areas: Name the two or three areas that matter most. "Spend extra time on the master bathroom" or "the kitchen floor is the priority" tells the team immediately where to focus
- Access: Confirm the access plan — key drop-off, lockbox code, in-person handoff
- Schedule constraints: If there's a window for the clean (you need to be back at 3pm) or if you need them gone before a certain time, communicate that at booking, not on the day
After the First Visit: Give Feedback
The first clean is never perfect — there's always something to adjust, something the team missed, or something you'd prefer done differently. Give feedback promptly after the first visit. Specific feedback is infinitely more useful than vague feedback:
- "The area under the dining table needs to be vacuumed — there was still debris there" beats "the floor wasn't clean enough"
- "Please don't move the items on the desk" is actionable; "please be careful" isn't
Ongoing: What to Communicate When Things Change
Renovation in progress, a new pet, a child born, a schedule change, a major event coming up — anything that affects the home's cleaning needs or your access/schedule should go to the cleaning service as early as possible. Last-minute changes are the most likely to result in a poor service experience; advance notice lets the team adapt.