Queen Bee Cleaning Service
Queen Bee Cleaning Service used RingCentral’s global cloud features to become a $1.5 million-a-year business
Industry
Professional Services
Hq
Seattle, WA
Year founded
2015
Employees
30
Industry
Professional Services
Hq
Seattle, WA
Year founded
2015
Employees
30
One sticking point in our company’s growth was that we were limited in how many hours we could keep our office staffed. After I switched to RingCentral—and discovered their call handling and forwarding features—I was able to outsource our business lines to reps halfway around the world. That allowed us to more than double our customer service hours. And that more than doubled our revenue, taking us well passed the million-dollar mark.
Cristobal (Chris) Mondragon
$1.5M
increase in recurring revenue after switching to RingCentral
Double
the number of hours a week that customers can reach Customer Service and Sales
45%
success rate with new coupon offers sent to customers via SMS text
Anyone who thinks that professional cleaning is a commodity industry, and that all companies offering these solutions are essentially interchangeable, hasn’t seen the work of Queen Bee Cleaning Service.
The Seattle-area business, which offers a full range of cleaning services for homes and businesses, has earned an industry-leading reputation for reliability, quality, and professionalism. The company maintains a 4.8-star rating across hundreds of Google Reviews, for example, and a 4.9-star customer rating covering more than 100 reviews on Facebook.
This positive word-of-mouth from delighted customers helps explain why—with the exception of 2020, when the lockdowns prevented the company’s staff from working for much of the year—Queen Bee Cleaning has increased its sales in each year since the company’s founding in 2015.
Staffing and telephony issues were constraining growth
Cristobal (Chris) Mondragon, who owns Queen Bee Cleaning Service with his wife, explains that when pent-up demand for cleaning services was unleashed after several months of COVID lockdowns, the company faced a serious challenge.
“Once the lockdowns started lifting, suddenly everybody wanted their house or office cleaned,” he says. “Our in-house customer service rep had left during the pandemic, so I was taking every call myself, or trying to, but I couldn’t answer them all. And in this business, if you don’t call a prospective customer back right away—or better yet, answer when they call the first time—there’s a good chance you’ll lose them to another company.”
As Chris explains, Queen Bee’s business hours were 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, like most companies in the industry. But he realized a lot of customers and prospects were calling after hours and on weekends—and Queen Bee Cleaning was missing those calls.
So Chris simultaneously investigated two related solutions: outsourcing to a team of Customer Service Virtual Assistants overseas, to expand the company’s capacity and operating hours, and a cloud communications solution capable of routing customer calls seamlessly around the world.
RingCentral helps the company more than double its operating hours
With RingCentral, Chris had the global cloud telephony solution that would enable Queen Bee Cleaning to make its boldest move ever: outsourcing all of the company’s inbound sales and customer service calls to a team of professional reps in the Philippines.
“I began hiring Virtual Assistants in Manila, highly trained customer service reps who were terrific,” he says. “And because I could hire several reps there for less than I was paying one employee here, I was able to create multiple shifts for our phone lines and lengthen our business hours by more than 100%—extending them from 7am until 9pm Monday through Friday and even 9am to 6pm on weekends. And I was able to make it all work seamlessly because I had RingCentral.”
Aside from the fact that it’s global and enables high-quality calls around the world, what I really appreciate about RingCentral is the flexibility for call routing and rules. We can easily set it up to ring on one Virtual Assistant’s phone, and then after a few rings automatically go to the next Virtual Assistant’s number. And then, if necessary, we can always have it transfer directly to me.
Cristobal (Chris) Mondragon
Improving operations and revenue-generating efforts with RingCentral
In addition to enabling Chris to grow his customer service department and expand the company’s operating hours considerably, he points out that RingCentral has also helped Queen Bee Cleaning improve workflows in several ways.
“The built-in SMS texting with RingCentral is helping us work more efficiently with customers and improve their experience,” he says. “Many customers prefer to communicate with us by text rather than a call. It also means our team can communicate with more customers in a given hour or day because texting is faster. And RingCentral makes it easy for us to send and receive texts on our business numbers—from our computers or even our personal cell phones.”
Chris has also found another innovative for RingCentral’s business texting feature: sending discount offers to existing customers.
“Say I’m looking at tomorrow’s jobs, and in one ZIP code it looks like we’re going to be slow. I can quickly put together a coupon for discounted service tomorrow and send it to my customers and prospects in that area. People really respond to those messages. If I send out 20 texts, about 9 or 10 people will take the offer and book a job for the next day.”
Another tool in the RingCentral platform Cris is leveraging to gain business intelligence and increase Queen Bee Cleaning’s bottom line is the reporting dashboard. “I check the RingCentral reports all the time, primarily to see where our leads are coming from,” he explains. “That helps me deploy more of our marketing budget to where it’s generating the best returns.”
A RingCentral integration helps improve the customer experience
As Chris also points out, RingCentral has helped Queen Bee Cleaning solve another growth-related challenge that was affecting the company’s ability to deliver outstanding service.
“When you’re a small company, email can be sufficient for customer service requests. But as you grow, those emails start to overwhelm you. So I checked out the RingCentral App Gallery and found that RingCentral integrates with Zoho Desk, our customer service app. Now, when we get a customer service ticket, we’re automatically pulling the conversation and connecting it to that customer’s profile in RingCentral, which helps tremendously when we respond.”
Switching to RingCentral has removed the barriers to our company’s continued growth. We can hire more people, anywhere in the world, to handle the ever-increasing traffic on our business numbers. That has already helped us take this company to seven figures in annual revenue—and we’re not slowing down.
Cristobal (Chris) Mondragon
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