I've always tried to get the commercial accounts to get outboard with the vacuuming. After all, MOST commercial buildings have a program of vacuuming in place already. So we let them know that the carpet should be vacuumed well - before we arrive. In some cases we have even arranged for them to do the vacuuming when we wrote up the proposal for the work. We always get a YES when we let them know that good vacuuming beforehand will help the carpet to clean up better. And they never seem to feel that it is our job.
That being said, we also carry an X-Vac pile lifter on the truck. We will often run over the traffic areas prior to cleaning to pull up the matted carpet and try to recover some additional dry soil. But we don't generally vacuum every square inch of the carpet. As mentioned above, by educating the customer beforehand, we generally find that they do a reasonable job of vacuuming before we arrive. And if by chance there's still a paperclip in a corner after we're finished cleaning the carpet - that's their baby, not ours, since the pre-vac was their responsibility.
Educating the customer about the value of doing a good pre and post vacuuming has worked well for us. In most cases, it seems to address the bulk of the vacuuming, only leaving the higher soil level sections of the carpet for our crew to take care of prior to the cleaning.
Rick Gelinas
