Overview

In general, TIDY's goal is to serve as your partner for all things cleaning and maintenance. What we have found is that all customers, regardless of size, want to customize their experience in some way. There is no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to helping customers with cleaning and maintenance.

Taking these in rough order, typically customers want to improve the following things:

1. Improving Acceptance Rate of Jobs - Making sure their job requests get accepted.
2. Improving Reliability of Jobs - Making sure their job requests get to the job (important as the cancellation rate in the industry is so high).
3. Improving Quality of Jobs - Making sure jobs get done the way you want.
4. Ease of Administration of Jobs - Making it easier to do all of the above.

In these sections, we will outline best practices for each of these.

Best Practices: Improving The Acceptance Rate & The Reliability Rate of Jobs

The probability of a job request getting accepted and completed is affected dramatically by the property and your settings. These are some of the factors:

Generally, the "better" your expected acceptance rate, the more high-quality pros will compete for your jobs.

So for example, making a job request for Christmas day on Christmas Eve with gender preferences in a remote location at a low rate will have an extremely low probability of acceptance. Making a job request for something over a couple of days, with reasonable rates and at least some notice, will have a high acceptance rate.

Adding pros you may have worked with before will help ensure a higher acceptance rate, however it is not required, and if you do not have pros we generally recommend just having us work on it for you. But if you have pros you worked with before, we recommend adding them.



With this in mind, these are our recommendations on practical steps you can take to improve your expected acceptance rates and reliability.

Book the job as early as possible. 

This way, if there is any issue with the job, a Pro has the time to come make it right later that day (or the following day).  For example: if you have a party at 8pm and you schedule a 2.5 hour job for 5pm.  Even if you get 2 Pros, if they shut down the freeway at 4:30pm, they may end up too late to help as much as you'd like.  By scheduling early in the day, you enable more opportunities to respond to issues.  For example, if you had the job done at 8am, but something similar happened, you could get it done later in the day.

Add additional Pros to your account.

If you have another vendor, even one who is not your favorite, add them. TIDY will reach out to other Pros you add to your list when issues occur in your priority order.

Be careful disputing and blacklisting.

If you truly never want to see a person again, then by all means definitely blacklist them. However, if they were not your favorite but you would use them in a pinch, we would recommend adding them to the bottom of your priority list in the "My Pros" section. This is a better option. Pros cannot see your blacklist rate directly, but they can pick thresholds to not work with people.

Be careful canceling & cancel early.

If you frequently book and cancel jobs, this is considered a negative by pros. Pros can see if you cancel on them, and if you do this you might get seen as an unreliable customer. Some customers might not really end up needing a job done, but decide to let it happen anyway to preserve the relationship. If you need to cancel, then cancel! Canceling earlier is generally more polite than later cancellations. We just recommend being thoughtful about things. Pros can't see your average cancellation rate, but they can set thresholds and preferences that mean if you have a high cancellation rate you may not be able to get them for jobs.

Book the job as early as possible. 

This way, if there is any issue with the job, a Pro has the time to come make it right later that day (or the following day).  For example: if you have a party at 8pm and you schedule a 2.5 hour job for 5pm.  Even if you get 2 Pros, if they shut down the freeway at 4:30pm, they may end up too late to help as much as you'd like.  By sched

Watch your predicted acceptance rates.

TIDY provides when booking a probability that a job request will be accepted. This is a helpful way to see how you are doing on some of these aspects for a specific job.

Enable backup times.

Most people, for most cases, don't have "one exact time or not at all". By setting backup times, you still have a confirmed timeslot, but in the event some flexibility is really needed, then the job can still happen. For example: Let's say you have an 8am job, and the Pro has a car accident and can't make it at 7:45am.  Without backup times, you would be unlikely to get a substitute to come within 15 minutes.  If you set a backup time for 9:30am, you would have plenty of time to get a substitute.

Allow substitutes.

Allowing substitutes allows someone to fill in for your regular Pro if they can't make it.  If you only allow your preferred Pro to come, then you can manually request one later, but it is less likely to be successful (because when finding a substitute you want to start the search ASAP).  For example, let's say you have a 8am job with Maria and she gets sick.  If you don't allow substitutes, you would have to get the job with Maria on a different day when she is better.  If you did allow substitutes, someone else could fill in for her.

This also allows us to authorize Standbys for a job. Standbys are pros who are in the area, knowing you may need them. In the event they are needed, they are able to get there quickly.

Best Practices: Improving Quality of Jobs

Improving the quality of jobs is something that can require time, and is an ongoing effort. Our team is here to help you with these pieces.

At a high level, getting someone to do the job right might require:

• Start by adding current pros: Even if you are looking to switch away from your current pros/vendors, we recommend adding them to your list when starting to use TIDY to ensure you have a smooth transition when starting. They may not be your favorite for cost or quality reasons, but having them in the mix improves the chance of smooth and high-quality experiences.
• Load property information: Capture the current state of the property to provide an accurate starting point.
• Use digital to-do lists: Define the desired outcome, including item placement, tasks, and other details.
• Video Introductions: Utilize our "intro video" feature (Video Introductions) by contacting an account manager, and giving your pros a video introduction to the property.
• Book appropriate job sizes: Ensure sufficient time is budgeted for tasks, e.g., if booking a cleaning with three loads of laundry, allocate enough time for each load.
• Inspections
  • In-Person Inspections: These are more work and/or expense, but having an in-person inspection from a third party is the most reliable way to ensure quality work. TIDY can help book in-person inspections for you as a separate job type.
  • Remote Inspections: Use the TIDY remote inspection feature to get an inspection done as a part of another job. The remote inspection feature asks your pro to take photos or videos either before the job, after the job, or both. You can also add fields to ask the pro to do inspection tasks while on the job. For example, some people add inspection tasks to a cleaning.
• Track activity with GPS: Monitor pros to confirm they are performing their tasks.
• Communicate with the pros: If you have specific concerns or things you want the pro to do, communicating with the pro with our communication tools can dramatically improve results. In addition, you may be able to provide pros with immediate help and clarifications when needed.
• Schedule inspections: Physically check the property after a job to ensure quality.
• Assemble the right team: Finding the right pros may take time.
  • Add more pros to your account.
  • Block pros you don't like.
  • Favorite those you do. Our AI will improve pairing recommendations based on your input, but the process can take time and ultimately depends on you.
  • Leaving reviews will also help us to understand your areas of issues, and help find solutions.
• Require Your Own Training: If you really feel specific training is important, you can require them on your account. This is not recommended, though, as it will dramatically reduce your acceptance rate. Talk to an account manager about setting up your training materials as a requirement.
• Speak with the success team: Discuss concerns, and we'll review your account, ensuring there are no issues and suggesting new pros if needed.

Getting quality right is an ongoing effort, and we will work with your team to make sure we get things up to your standards.

Best Practices: Improving Ease of Administration of Jobs

Generally speaking, to improve the administration of jobs, we recommend:

• Following the onboarding guide: Getting Started: Rental Properties
• Communicate with the TIDY team about what you want to do.
• Integrating whenever possible to the tools you use.
• Give feedback to TIDY about where your pain points are. We may have a solution for you already, and if not, we may be able to add it!

FAQs

TIDY is the most technically sophisticated approach to getting cleaning and maintenance jobs done. So our approach can be different than many are used to. Here are some FAQs that address common concerns:

Why can't I just pick better pros?

First, if you have a pro added to your account, you can always book them specifically. But sometimes, when a client has an issue, they want to know how they can get "better pros". Practically speaking, we recommend following our best practices to improve the acceptance rate. This is the best way in the system to get better pros for a job.

Given our experience, we see that:

• Pro quality is not typically binary, as in it is unique for each job, even beyond client and pro! Similar to dating, there is no "best person", it is rather the best person available for the job. This is not like Uber, where people basically get you from point A to point B. In over 1M jobs, we have seen:
  • Pros that a client liked for a while change their mind on.
  • Pros that worked well for 1 job type with a client, but not another.
  • Pros that some clients LOVE and other clients STRONGLY DISLIKE.
• Pro reliability is also not binary. Different people have different patterns of reliability issues. In our experience, we have seen:
  • Some pros are very reliable on some days of the week, but not others. This is likely due to life plans, school issues, or other issues they may not even realize.
  • Some pros go on streaks of reliability and not. Again, this is often driven by life issues.
  • Some pros are unreliable only for specific types of jobs. Maybe they don't like them as much, so are more hesitant to do them.

All of these factors go back to our core principles of:

• Using AI to create better predictions of quality and reliability, going beyond simple unreliable metrics.
• Using many pros, so that we can find the right fit for a job and find replacement options as they become available.

Some pros are better on average, but trying to find a single, consistently great pro is hard/rare.

Why can't I see pro ratings?

If you know the pro, you can see their ratings on their website. If you don't know the pro, we recommend using our AI predictions and generally don't share ratings because they are not effective. Issues with ratings include:

• The fit is typically around the job, not the pro themselves, for the reasons outlined in "Why can't I just pick better pros?"
• The quality of fit is more complex than reviews, Low volume/noise can lead to swings in reviews.
• Most vendors do many fewer jobs than, say, an Uber driver. So the number of reviews is typically much lower than you might see in other industries.
• The average reviews change across industries. For example, cleaning has a lower average satisfaction rate industry-wide (67% average positive rate) versus driving (98% average positive rate). So you have to benchmark the rating of the pro for the industry.
• TIDY collects rather unfiltered review data on individual pros, whereas other data sources (e.g., Yelp) have review data at the company level, across all their pros.

Another practical issue of looking at an individual pro for a job is that if you look at 1 person's reviews, you reasonably expect to see them show up. This means you forgo all the advantages of having many pros. And looking at a pro who may be switched for a better fit, does not seem helpful.

So overall, while there are some ways to see pro ratings, we generally don't think its helpful to review these and don't recommend it.

Can I define my own minimum criteria for pros?

There are some compliance requirements you can configure, and we are considering adding other metrics to your criteria. Reach out to us if you have any suggestions for new filters to add to your account.

Can I just block anyone that is not reliable?

We are looking into other account level blocks, see "Can I define my own minimum criteria for pros?". However, it is unlikely that this would actually help reliability, since TIDY helps you optimize pros with a range of reliability metrics.

For example, say you have 2 pros.

Pro A has an on time arrival rate of 90%. Pro B has an on time arrival rate of 60%. This matches the industry average of 75%.

Would blocking Pro B (with a 60% rate) improve reliabilty? Statistically no...or at least not in most cases.

Pro A would already be preferred all things being equal. So the only time when Pro B would get the job would be when Pro A is unavailable. In addition, if Pro A is booked, and Pro B is a standby, you would expect 90% of the time Pro A to show up. The remaining 10% of the time, 6 of 10 times Pro B would show up, for a 96% completion rate, which is very high for the industry. Using 2 pros together, even when one is less preferred, typically leads to better results.