Statistically speaking, laundry business is one such business that will always be on the upscale move. KPMG states that only 5% of the market is organized while the unorganized laundry sector in India is worth 5,200 crores annually, which yet remains unexplored. The pool of online consumers is expected to grow by 20% CAGR. The organized sector is quickly adapting to the concept of e-commerce and giving their business a boost. But the unorganized part of the Laundry Business is still struggling due to many loopholes in its operations.
Some Loopholes in the Laundry Business Operations are as follows –
- Losing Clothes
With several orders taken in a day, manually keeping records of whereabouts of the clothes can be a hectic task because of which there is a high tendency of losing clothes. Keeping a data entry of the same can help ensure that the clothes are neither misplaced or delivered wrongly nor spoilt or damaged due to wrong treatment because a lot can go wrong if the clothes are not carefully segregated, marked and stored. - Customized Preferences
Dry Cleaning and Laundry Industry is a service industry and in a service industry, it is very crucial to take care of individual preferences of your customers. Although it is difficult to note down each customer’s preference on orders. Sometimes, this causes a big loss in the form of color stains, loosening of elastic, etc. Moreover, it’s frustrating for the customer to remind the service provider of his preferences on every visit or home pickup. This damages the experience of the customer and he/she might be reluctant to come to you for service the next time. - Customer Communication Gap
In the unorganized sector, there is minimal customer interaction which can often lead to miscommunication or misunderstandings which can hamper the business and negatively affect the experience of the customer.
This usually happens during peak seasons when there are a lot of garments to process. In this case, you are not able to commit to the timeliness of the delivery. It so happens that a customer comes to the store and the order is not ready which frustrates the customer finally leading to a dissatisfied customer due to poor service. - Managing infinite bill books
If a customer comes after 3 months (usually without his receipt), it is taxing to search for his order. Now that every customer’s details are fed into the software, the search is simple. With just a mobile number or name, the order of a particular customer can be determined. - Theft/Pilferages
If you have a traditional laundry setup, this is a common practice, and you would be familiar with it. Sometimes, shop workers take advantage thinking who would come to know at which stage the garment went missing. An average Dry Cleaners pays about 40-50k in a year due to pilferages which are impossible to pinpoint with a manual style of operations. We highly recommend businessmen to use a Laundry Tracking Software to manage their business so as to identify the loss of garment at any stage of the service process. - No Business Measurement
More than 95% of the dry cleaners are not equipped with tools to measure business growth and performance. This leads to making an intuitive business decision rather than data driven. People measure their activity manually using bill books and calculator and end up spending more than 2 hours daily, which adds up to an annual estimation of approx 600 hours, for calculating sales, accounts, commissions, etc. and hence their work life balance is affected considerably. Use of a Dry Cleaners Accounting Software will definitely help you manage your business in a better way.
These are some of the major loopholes faced by the laundry business in the absence of an organized system of arranging and managing the massive task of collecting, recording and keeping customer data and At the same time ensuring that the service is customer friendly and efficient. In the next article, we will discuss How to Better Manage your Laundry Business with QDC Software
