The Clean Space were unprofessional
The Clean Space are an unprofessional organisation, poorly managed at both the area level and higher up and I would urge you to consider other options before contracting them. I am the owner of a fitness studio in the midlands and due to COVID and being constrained by their contract terms and promises that they would improve things we remained a client of theirs for a little over 3 years. Staying so long was my fault to some degree, I know, but I like to give people a chance. We suffered continued poor cleaning performance from cleaners and poor management of the account. Trying to get important cleaning tasks specific to our site embedded into their daily practice was hard work and took a lot of repeated requests on our part, which was frustrating and exhausting. On one occasion it got to the point we had to present CCTV footage of their cleaner having naps on a bench for 20 minutes. Whilst the area manager removed them from their position as our cleaner, they also found it funny that their employee had done that. Effective communication was always a problem. It was often very difficult to get a message through to the area manager and many messages were left without response.
In the cleaning industry I do have the cynical view that the grass is probably not always greener and so stuck with The Clean Space for far too long. Eventually, this concern didn’t matter, surely it had to be better than what I was experiencing with The Clean Space. I served them notice knowing that we were required to provide 3 months’ notice. I came in the next day to find their set of keys to my establishment posted through the letter box and all the cleaning equipment was gone. We were suddenly left without a cleaner, but I obviously had to keep my business trading as I have members to serve. I later received an email from the area manager saying they had received my notice and decided to just pack up and leave, against their contractual agreement, which we were trying to abide by in giving full notice. We had also already paid upfront for the whole month! I called the director only to get a few blunt words, saying he was aware of what had happened, and I was further disappointed to hear that it had been on his instruction that they had behaved in that way. In my opinion that is not how you should do business and it is companies that operate in this sort of way that give the industry a bad reputation.
Fortunately, although the accounts and finance team have also been hard work throughout the contract, with many errors along the way, it is in going through this final issue that I believe it is quite likely because the rest of the company have not been providing them with the information they needed to get it right. In dealing with them to reclaim our refund Sam was excellent and I am grateful for that. Another silver lining is, the grass has proven to be greener and after scrambling around to keep things clean myself for a while, our new cleaner from Cleanse is far superior.