On the day we called to catch up with the Client Services team at their Rockefeller Center office, the hustle and bustle of Midtown Manhattan was more intense than usual. It was the eve of Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary show, and downstairs, team members were working to get everything set up for the celebration. Later, supervisors would inspect to ensure everything was in place for the milestone event.
Client Services by Tishman Speyer is a sub-company of the Tishman Speyer real estate company, which owns high-profile properties around the world. That includes Rockefeller Center in New York City.
“I just love being in the middle of everything,” administrator Samantha Jacobson told us. “As much as it’s the cleaning part, there’s a lot of cool things that you get to be in the vicinity of.”
Busy buildings in the city that never sleeps
Client Services operates out of Rockefeller Center. They handle “anything a client needs done in their space,” from cleaning and painting to lighting fixtures and construction.
It’s a lot to keep up with — which means the tools the team uses have to be able to keep up, too.
Accurate inspections = reliable results
Before OrangeQC, the team would take photos of a space, then come back to the office and fill out a paper form. But sometimes, the details would get lost in the process.
“You lose a lot of what you saw,” Jacobson said. “You don’t remember everything.”
Now, the digital forms can be done right on-site. They create a reliable record of how the work was done. If the operations team gets a complaint from a tenant, the first thing they do is pull up the most recent inspection performed in the space.
“One of the reasons we adopted the platform was to be able to say, okay, when was the last inspection? Without waiting for the supervisor to get in the form,” said Dennis McCann, the Director of Cleaning Operations.
That process helps the team meet their goal of a 24-hour turnaround time for addressing requests. It’s especially useful because much of the cleaning is done at night, so the supervisor isn’t necessarily on hand to ask during regular business hours.
“If someone says this wasn’t done last night, we can back ourselves up,” Jacobson said.
Employee training and management
The data from OrangeQC helps inform employee training and management. Jacobson can pull up a list of the company’s cleaning staff and see how the areas they’re responsible for are scoring. Then, the team can share those results with the cleaners as part of their training process.
“I love the list for people to be able to give cleaners different report cards,” Jacobson said.
The team’s staffing coordinator also uses OrangeQC to track performance by temporary staff. The data is part of the record the team takes into account when they evaluate people for permanent positions.
Flexibility to keep up with complex spaces
For Tishman Speyer, the ability to be flexible and responsive is a top priority. They now use OrangeQC as part of their bidding process. They also send tenants regular reports on their inspection results to help improve communication.
“We’re still playing with the system. We’re still trying different new things,” Jacobson said. “It’s been really easy to take feedback from the supervisors and fix whatever needs to be fixed in a second… It’s streamlined so much.”
A huge thank-you to the team at Client Services by Tishman Speyer for sharing your insights with us!
Is your team interested in learning how OrangeQC helps world-class facility teams manage quality for complex spaces? Request a one-on-one demo.
