Avoiding Uniform Rental Pricing Traps

A uniform rental program can bring tremendous benefit to companies, but they also bring questions if the program is not understood well.

 

At CITY, transparency is the most important thing when it comes to making you aware of how our service will help you and your business be more successful. Through the CITY Asset Management program or CAM, we ensure you always know what your next invoice will look like and what each charge entails. We empower our route service team to handle all invoice concerns directly with the customer and our route service representatives can thoroughly answer each charge on an invoice.

 

 

Unique to the laundry industry, we devise a system that makes sure you are in control of your uniform program.

 

“The whole process, from pricing down to how they use the product, should all be specific to that customer,” Colin Wetlaufer, CITY’s President said. “That all starts with understanding the bill and making it as easy as possible for our clients.”

 

So what goes into determining how much you could pay for your uniforms?

 

1. The Numbers: How many employees do you actually have? Depending on the size of your company, you might need 100 uniforms or 1000.
2. The Uniforms or Garments: What type of clothing do your employees need? We provide flame resistant and high visibility uniforms but are they right for your business? The cost can be influenced by what kind of material your uniforms are made of and how durable they have to be for safety purposes.
3. The Service: What are we delivering, how it’s being delivered, or how often are we delivering plays a role in how we invoice.

 

These all seem like simple things to cover but through over 100+ years of experience, we have seen that the number one concern for businesses is often the grey areas that never seem to be visible in contracts.

 

Here are the top 3 “grey areas” to look for:

 

1. Loss and Damage: What happens when a uniform disappears, or something is broken beyond repair? Often times, those costs roll over to the customer and businesses have to deal with fees associated with replacing uniforms. Some companies might even charge you for a completely new set of uniforms that a bad hire took off with.
2. Upgrades: Sometimes, somehow our favorite pair of jeans will not look that great anymore and we have to go to the store and buy a new pair to look our best. The same goes for uniforms. Scheduled replacements are important to make sure your organization can look the best. But what good does it do you if those upgrades don’t occur on the same timeline that you believe they should be upgraded? Apparel quality means different things to different people so consider having a conversation defining what the upgrade process looks like, for your organization.
3. Secret Changes – You started out with 100 employees, but you are expanding, and your new location needs 60 new uniforms for their staff. How much of an upcharge are you going to incur because of added employees? When you added these new people did your rate change? When you added another floor mat, did your service charge increase?

 

 

What Can We Do to Help?

 

At CITY, our goal is to eliminate those grey areas from the start.  Through pricing programs like CAM, we are able to eliminate unpredictable fees that our competition charges an employer regularly for.

 

“CAM is a program that essentially gives CITY the ability to simplify the billing process for our clients,” Chriss Carsello, CITY’s Sales Manager said. “It also doubles as an accountability system on our end, because it helps us to be transparent and honest throughout the invoicing process. It’s a great way for our customers to understand what we do and how we do it.”

 

Based on our client’s operational needs, the number of items they have in service, and their business operations, CITY’s staff will calculate and fully customize a billing solution that addresses inconsistent weekly invoicing and takes care of irregularities like missing or damaged garments. The key for CAM is to keep the customer’s bill as simple as possible, but also not oversimplifying it. We believe in giving the customer the ability to look at the bill, and at first glance, be able to identify the most important charges. It’s all about understanding what a customer is paying for, what’s included in the service and how CITY is providing the service.

 

We have completed studies to show why customers are frustrated and leave their uniform rental and laundry service provider. The top three reasons given are shortages, repairs not being done and a lack of fair and accurate billing. CAM provides billing transparency and solves all of the mentioned issues through one system.

 

“The relationship we have with a client should be like a partnership,” Colin said. “Eliminating means of conflict and providing a clean and simple process is how we foster that relationship for the long run.”

 

CITY has always been committed to providing a quality service and having value-added partnerships with our clients. Even if that just means simplifying an already existing uniform program, we will go the extra steps to make that vision a reality