Its about the way carpets are cleaned and the way customers/clients/the Great British Public (hereafter GBP) are dealt with by the Great British Carpet Cleaner.
Its a blog that will be of huge interest (the irony is intentional) to other carpet cleaners but also to Mr Joe or Ms Josephine Public who may be thinking about getting their carpets cleaned or have recently had their carpets cleaned.
Within the house the expense of flooring is one of the biggest investments you can make as a homeowner and yet the GBP do not protect that investment by having their carpets cleaned very regularly and for many they NEVER have their carpets cleaned but simply replace them after 5, 7, 10 or more years.
If by some remote chance they have a whim to get them cleaned they are very keen on price shopping regardless of the way that their carpet is going to be cleaned. They (usually) look for a cheap price before they ask other questions about how this cleaning is going to be achieved.
Sometimes they decide to DIY the carpet clean by renting a hire machine from a high street clothes dry cleaner or from a DIY retailer (hey that even makes sense).
Admittedly this is because as an industry we have not educated the public about the various methods of carpet cleaning and the benefits that follow what is in essence a fairly simple procedure.
Yes I am part of that industry so you may hear the feint echo of axes being ground but in a reasonable and very 'fair play' British way.
Recently, carpet cleaning in the UK has had some publicity or at least notoriety by being featured on the BBC consumer programme Watchdog whereby one firm of unscrupulous carpet cleaning cowboys were exposed for their 'Bait and Switch' tactics.
This was a particularly poor piece of consumer journalism, even by the standards of the Watchdog programme - hell it is info-tainment after all. Instead of examining the technical aspects of the carpet clean (which were on this expose by any standards woefully inept) the programme decided to concentrate on the 'Bait and Switch' con and consumer rights.
The expert that is usually called in with this format to examine the whole procedure does so from a secret vantage point and as an expert in that particular industry. However in a departure from this format but in keeping with the dignity of his white-collar profession as a consumer lawyer, the posh, educated bloke in this show watched the events on his smart laptop by video long after it had all happened.
The whole thing was a depressing damp squib really. Nothing was proved apart from the fact that there are dirty rotten scoundrels in the world who will try to take advantage of vulnerable people - so why not tell us something new like how it should be done and have a little inset with a decent CC bloke like the one off Kim and Aggie's show How clean is your house. Then people could actually learn something from the programme, it would only take a couple of minutes and could replace some of the totally pointless shots of Matt and his mate jumping on and off the bike.
I believe that the NCCA (National Carpet Cleaners Association) were consulted about this show and gave their feedback to the producers, but obviously they did not impress them sufficiently to get a place at the table.
This organisation (the NCCA) is the only large body purporting to represent the industry and yet it too has done a woefully inept job over the years in communicating any coherent message about the service industry to the GBP.
So we are left with a situation where the most recent public airing of the industry was so negative as a reflection of the business that not only do the GBP not know what we do but whatever it is we do, we do it very badly and try to get people to pay through the nose for it - thus confirming all the prejudices held by the GBP about our industry.
As an industry we are at Ground Zero!
I hope in this blog to be able to shed some independent light on the industry and provide an entertaining BUT informative commentary that will be useful to all its readers.
And in the spirt of the age all feedback is welcome...
http://www.steamcleancarpetservice.co.uk/
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