The Client

With more than 70 years of experience, San Francisco-based COIT is one of the largest home cleaning and restoration companies in the United States. The company’s motto — “Clean as new – that’s the COIT commitment to you” — is evidenced in the full customer satisfaction guarantee it has offered since its inception in 1950. COIT has served more than 12 million customers, cleaned millions of square feet of carpet, and continued to expand its service offerings from drapery, carpet, air duct, stone, and upholstery cleaning to include natural stone cleaning and hardwood floor maintenance. In the late 1980s, COIT introduced emergency restoration services to its offerings. COIT’s restoration services help renew homes and businesses when disaster strikes from water damage, mold remediation, content restoration, fire and smoke damage, and in some locations asbestos abatement.

Finding the Right Platform

As the business expands across the United States, Canada and Thailand, establishing and maintaining a solid online presence is critical to COIT’s success. In a world that looks online first for anything, a strong online presence indicates brand stability — that customers know you and like what you do — which is something COIT had difficulty establishing with their previous reputation management platform.

Consumers expect a certain level of communication, and this is where Reputation is definitely helping us. Think about your dentist, they don’t call you anymore; they text you. And when you don’t text back, they email, and when you don’t email back, they finally call you. With COIT, we’d call and call, because we had a technology barrier that Reputation is helping us overcome. We’re now texting our customers, saying, ‘It’s been a year since you’ve had your air ducts cleaned.’ The technology of being able to reach out to customers in a way they expected to be communicated with is where Reputation has been helping us bridge that gap and take us to new levels.”

Sara Arlia, Vice President of Marketing,
COIT Cleaners

“We were with a competitor, and I’m a firm believer that customers don’t know who that company is,” says Sara Arlia, Vice President of Marketing at COIT. “I didn’t know them until I came to COIT. They also own any reviews we received on their site, so when we left the company, all those reviews went away. COIT has been trusted by homes and businesses for over 70 years and I wanted to focus on growing our online reputation on sites that customers do utilize to find the best businesses to partner with; sites such as Google and Yelp.”

COIT then partnered with Reputation in August 2020 to help boost its stature on popular review and social media sites more broadly, rather than on a specific, less-known review site.

Leveraging Specific Tools

After partnering with Reputation, COIT focused primarily on the platform’s Messaging and Inbox products to help bypass some of the roadblocks the company was facing in reaching certain customers. Historically, the company had relied on phone calls to connect with new and current customers, but increasingly found that some calls weren’t getting through to customers, while others simply preferred connecting via text or other communication methods.

“Consumers expect a certain level of communication, and this is where Reputation is definitely helping us. Think about your dentist, they don’t call you anymore; they text you. And when you don’t text back, they email, and when you don’t email back, they finally call you. With COIT, we’d call and call because we had a technology barrier, which Reputation is helping us overcome. Now, we’re texting our customers, saying, ‘It’s been a year since you’ve had your air ducts cleaned.’ The technology of being able to reach out to customers in a way they expected to be communicated with is where Reputation has been helping us bridge that gap and take us to new levels.”

As part of this focus on texting, COIT launched several promotional campaigns via text offering discounts and clearances to some customers. In a four month period, COIT sent approximately 19,000 texts using the Reputation platform. They received 14,000 responses, leading to 88 sales opportunities and upwards of $26,000 in additional revenue.

Building an Online Presence

Customer communications isn’t the only challenge COIT is tackling. The company also wants to increase its review volume on popular search engines like Google as well as review platforms like Yelp. Knowing that many of its customers first encounter the brand online, COIT has focused on expanding its online presence through several tactics, such as by partnering with Reputation.

“We know that reputation is the leading factor for consumer decision making on a company,” says Arlia. “As we look at our strategy to obtain new customers, it’s more digitally focused. We have a search engine optimization and marketing strategy, we have a social strategy, and then it’s our reputation. That’s our strategy, knowing that it all leads back to online reputation and what people are saying about us. We’re taking an omnichannel approach.”

In 2019, we did a market research study to look at what influenced market buying decisions. A lot of people think the number one thing is price, but it isn’t. It’s reputation — it’s what people believe you to be.”

Sara Arlia, Vice President of Marketing,
COIT Cleaners

What’s Next?

As COIT continues to enhance its online stature and improve its communications with customers, the company intends to take text messaging strategy to the next level.

“I want to take it even further and do confirmations for our technicians,” says Arlia. “Confirming with clients two days in advance via text.”

Enabling customers to confirm their appointments with technicians via text, rather than through email or over the phone, will make working with COIT even more convenient for its customers and more efficient for the business.

This leveraging of texting as a communication method underscores COIT’s commitment to making its services as convenient and accessible as possible for its customers, embracing what COIT’s clients of today want rather than what may have worked for the company historically.