WEST NEWTON, Mass. — Just as retail self-service laundry owners endeavor to best serve their walk-in and drop-off customers, multi-housing laundry operators combine best practices with hard work in an effort to serve their contracted community area laundry rooms in places such as apartment buildings, condominiums and public housing.
And like their retail counterparts, those overseeing multi-housing laundries have adapted to providing service in a pandemic environment, with its enhanced facilities cleaning and social distancing, but are looking forward to the day when things get back to something approaching normal.
Scott Scarpato is CEO and owner of Automatic Laundry Service Co., based here in West Newton, and current president of the Multi-housing Laundry Association (MLA), the North American trade association of operator and supplier companies providing professional laundry services for the multi-housing industry.
When the pandemic emergency was declared, laundry facilities managers like Automatic Laundry kept plugging along.
“Many of us were deemed essential,” says Scarpato of the country’s laundry facilities management firms. “In the case of our company, we never shut down, we never stopped working. In fact, we got busier. The pressure was on to keep things running; the CDC said that washing clothes was very important.”
Immediate challenges were keeping workers safe and the laundry equipment clean and usable.
“But I would say the biggest thing that happened was that it accelerated the contactless payment systems,” he says.
His company had been utilizing an app-based system for a few years when the pandemic hit.
“People didn’t want to have to touch … and it was harder to get coins or money. The resident customers of ours adopted (using) digital payments much faster. So, our phone-based app just blew up.”
How else has technology influenced laundry facilities management?
“Over time, companies … have developed real-time systems that can tell you exactly to the second where a washer or dryer is in status,” Scarpato says. “Those were a front-facing technology so the resident could … monitor when the laundry room was open, when washers and dryers were available, and receive notifications when their load of laundry was done.”
But Scarpato says the real value in such a system is that the machines now have the capability to alert facility managers when a machine has malfunctioned or is need of maintenance. Through two-way communication, managers often can clear errors remotely and start a new machine for the resident who encounters a problem.
Not all multi-housing adopts the common laundry approach. Some developers of high-rise apartment buildings are moving toward installing laundry equipment in each residential unit.
“It’s absolutely true that the adoption of in-unit washers and dryers has been a popular movement,” Scarpato says. “However, there still are buildings being built with community laundry rooms because of several factors.”
Having laundry equipment in-unit means losing a portion of the apartment’s livable space. Also, a study has shown that residents with in-unit laundry equipment will use considerably more water than if they would use larger, more efficient commercial laundry equipment, he says.
What are the biggest tests that lie ahead for laundry facilities management?
“I think the challenges are going to be keeping pace with our users’ wants,” Scarpato says. “How do they want to pay for something? How do they want to use something? What products and features do washers and dryers offer that meet their needs?”
While millennials are familiar with the new technologies in use, there’s an aging population among facility residents who aren’t and will need assistance as things evolve.
“In the old days, people called you when they had a service problem,” Scarpato says. “Today, they’re emailing, they’re texting, they’re tweeting. There are so many inbound ways to reach us and so many outbound ways for us to contact these people that it creates a very different experience.
“The challenge, to me, is the laundry facility management companies have to continually grow and use technology to better interact with their customers, because they’re changing.”
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Bruce Beggs at [email protected].