Since posting my original review, I've had a couple of interactions with the owner of this…read morebusiness, Kim. As a result, I feel I need to clarify my earlier rating and update the overall rating. I'm going to break it down into a few areas here:
Cleaning
As far as the cleaning itself went, it was pretty good. If this review was based on cleaning alone, I'd call it 4 stars on the Yelp scale. I only had them over once, and I opted for the hourly service rather than have the entire house cleaned. What they did clean, they did pretty well.
Price
I didn't have them clean the entire house as the owner's over-the-phone estimate was "about $400 and up", which I thought was too high. Kim offered me an hourly option, which I thought would give me a good sense of how they worked and whether or not I could make something work with them. In my opinion, what her 3 professional cleaners were able to do for $250 wasn't quite worth it. Again, on the Yelp scale, this rates 2 stars in my book.
Customer Service
This is where things went sour. We had agreed on 2-1/2 hours, yet the team continued cleaning after that time was up. I thought they were either unaware of the time parameters I'd given Kim or were trying to up my bill a little. Turns out they were just trying to finish areas they'd started and weren't looking to increase the charges - something they could have told me beforehand. But it worked out.
Afterward, the cleaning team spent quite a long time standing around on my front porch. It turns out they were waiting for a ride - again, they didn't tell me this. It wasn't anything major, but the lack of communication bothered me. At that point I'd rate customer service 3 stars.
I didn't hear back from Kim after the cleaning, and since she didn't get back to me I wrote her off and wrote my review. She responded by telling me that her clients usually call her to schedule cleaning, not the other way around. Fine. But she also made comments that I found disturbing, inaccurate, and in some ways insulting. In particular, she said that she normally doesn't clean houses with uncaged or unconfined animals, something she did not state when I told her I had cats. She further stated that I should have read the client information section on her website, something I didn't know existed.
Kim said that I "downed" her business. I replied that 3 stars here explicitly means "A-OK". It means "Good", which was my honest assessment. It does not mean Great and certainly not Excellent, which seemed to be what she expected me to write in my review. I pointed out that if she wanted a 5-star review, she would have to give 5-star service. So for customer service, it was down to 2 stars at that point, but I saw no point in changing the review to reflect that.
But then...
Bad Weirdness
A while later, Kim posted a response to my review on Yelp in which she misrepresented our exchanges and also made disparaging comments about me and my household, which I regard as defamatory. She accused me of hoarding cats, implied that I was a bad parent and an unsanitary person, and generally tried to trash my reputation as a reviewer and as a customer.
(For the record, I do not hoard cats. I keep my house as clean as possible with 3 high-maintenance children and several special-needs cats, all of whom (the cats, not the kids) were rescues of one sort or another. But that's why I wanted to hire a cleaning service - to clean, that is, rather than be insulted by one. And as far as being a bad parent, let me just say that I am the best bad parent in my zip code.)
Kim concluded her response with a backhanded comment implying that I would not be able to find another cleaning service. In fact, I have: they are responsive, communicative, efficient, effective, and a whole lot cheaper than Kim's. I won't name them here as that wouldn't be fair, but you can find them on this site with consistently high praise from others (I haven't reviewed them as my wife has already done that). Also, they don't insult or libel me when I give them feedback.
Anyway, my rating has dropped a star, not due to the service or price of the cleaning itself but due to the extremely poor treatment I've received from the owner subsequently. Yelp does not have a star rating low enough for that. The only thing keeping this at 2 stars rather than 1 is the fact that they did clean most of the areas of my house that I'd asked to be cleaned in a reasonably competent manner. Everything beyond that has been a severe disappointment.
