We do no collecting.
Everyone pays us by DD exceot for 5 customers who are from the start who pay by cheque. I’ll switch or cull these last ones by the end of November tho.
It took about 6 months to get all the rest to change over to DD. ( I did it about 6 years ago). I sent letters out with DD signuo forms, chased these up with calls over the next 3 months, and then also was sending the cleaners out with lists of customers to knock on on the day of their clean with a DD form for the customer to complete.
In the end I had about 30% left who hadn’t switched.
I then closed my bank account (so nobody was able to pay by SO or BACs any longer), and called and door knocked this last set until they signed up.
It took persistent gentle effort and we had to ignore a lot of people telling us they wouldn’t do it. We just kept asking.
That’s my experience.
The oldest (longest) customers were typically the least willing to change.
We won’t let anyone sign up before they have setup a DD now. We won’t book them in before we have it.
Any one off jobs are paid in advance to book them in (unless They’re a DD customer when we add the amount to their next payment).
Hope that helps 👍🏻. It was well worth it
I have to say I absolutely love this
Can you tell me what you did when people said they don't want to do it and you kept on asking 
I'm you you'll continued to clean the windows
And kept on saying please can you do direct debit or did you at one point go firm say it needs to be direct debit
I also love the way they have to pay in advance if there a one-off clean on invoice
hey crystal!
i got mentored by Julie from Concept 2O in Cardiff and she was brilliant about stuff like this. it was her road map we followed for getting people to switch.
initially i think the letters we sent said, we're putting up prices by £2.50 but you can stay at the same price if you switch to DD.
we chased up anyone who hadn't sent back their forms and called them asking them to set them up there and then over the phone. its that old sales method of just assuming they are going to do it, so you just lead them on the call.
any objections you deal with then and there but usually they just try to put it off. usually its just a case of saying 'we are switching it over because it means we can keep our prices competitive and offer a better service (less mistakes with money)
then you just reappeat the same script everytuime, if they dont setup on the phone we would just send a form out in the post or by email.
like i say, most people won't say 'No' they just say they haven't got around to it yet.
we would say things like it really makes a big difference to us and it would really help us out if they could set it up now, so basically appeal to people for help. like Im sure most of us on here, our customers tend to really quite like us, and recognise we are a local firm doing our best so they want to help...
some people say they want to cancel their Standing order first, or pay by cheque and dont want to give us their bank details for security, so we would let them know that on every cheque they give us they are giving us their bank account number and sort code already...
we just used friendly, persistent pressure basically, asking them to help us, explaining how it would work, and making it really easy fir them to sort out right away by doing it on the phone with them, or eventually on the doorstep.
the final step of closing the bank account was the genius of Julie's IMHO. then the customers have a problem that they aren't paying you any longer so its easier for them to fill in the bloomin form that find another widow cleaner!
in fairness, i think this is easier when you have staff, so i had an office assistant who did most the calling, and got my window cleaners to door knock. i paid them an extra £1 for each form they brought back filled in so over a week they could add £30 or something to their takings easily.
if i was doing it now and didn't have staff i would just get a short term staff member to call them up or a VA to handle the thing.
it pays off massively over time, both in terms of it saves loads of time, means less admin, easier bookkeeping, and really easy to put up prices.
we never said to people we wouldn't clean their windows any longer no, unless they had gone over 3 cleans without paying. so some we forced into this position by stopping their previous method of payment (SO or BACs or Cheque)
i will force the final ones to switch or leave us now though. i have to accept some or most will cancel now, though one 90 year old switched over just last month after holding out for years!! she said she paid everything else by DD nowadays anyway
