What is soft services?
Soft services are the facilities services delivered to the people in a building rather than to the building itself — cleaning, security, catering, waste, grounds and reception.
They are what occupants actually experience, which gives them a visibility out of proportion to their share of the budget. A building with immaculate plant and poor cleaning is perceived as badly run.
They are labour-intensive, which makes them the services where TUPE, staffing levels and turnover drive quality far more than equipment or systems do.
Measurement is usually by audit and satisfaction rather than by certificate, which makes agreeing the measure at the outset more important than it is for hard services.
In practice
A client measuring soft services on audit scores alone.
The scores are good. The thing occupants mention is that the washrooms run out of supplies on Friday afternoons.
Soft services are judged by occupants on availability and responsiveness more than on standard, and those are not what a monthly audit measures.
The complaint and the metric are describing different buildings.
What goes wrong in practice
- Measured only by complaint volume, which reports on tolerance rather than on standards.
- Staffing levels reduced without the specification being changed to match.
- Audit criteria never agreed with the client, so every score is contested.