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70% of executives say customer expectations are evolving faster than their organisations can adapt. Nearly a third of consumers say they've stopped using or buying from a brand because of poor customer experience. PwC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey frames this as a customer-experience issue, but the underlying expectation is broader: people increasingly expect services to be responsive, consistent and quick to recover when something goes wrong.
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That expectation doesn't disappear when someone walks into an office, hospital, airport or hotel instead of a store. In facilities management, it shows up in something occupants notice constantly: whether a building consistently feels clean, cared for and well maintained. That consistency is ultimately what soft FM quality control is supposed to verify. The problem is that the service runs continuously while the formal check on whether the standard is being maintained may happen only periodically.
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We heard a version of this gap directly from the FM leadership team at a large global technology and business services company. On the buyer side of a soft FM contract with an established, tier-one provider, quality was checked roughly twice a year, largely through manual, checklist-based audits. Whether that frequency is typical across the market isn't the point. The mechanism itself reveals a larger problem: soft FM service is continuous, and the visibility into its quality is still periodic.
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What is quality control in soft FM?

Quality control in soft FM is the process of verifying that services such as cleaning, security and reception are being delivered to the agreed standard, not simply that scheduled tasks have been completed. These services run every day, yet whether they continue to meet the required standard may be checked only periodically, through a scheduled inspection or spot check.
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For much of the period between formal inspections, there may be no continuous, evidence-based view of whether the standard is holding.
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Why does this pattern show up so often?

Contract structure is a large part of the answer. Soft FM contracts tend to define what needs to be done in detail, which tasks, on what schedule, against which specifications. What they define far less consistently is how that standard should be evidenced between formal inspections. The issue isn't that contracts don't care about quality. It's that they often define quality in ways that are easier to verify periodically than continuously, which is why task completion and periodic audit results end up carrying more weight than continuous service quality. We've written before about how contract and incentive structures shape whether FM operations have any real reason to change how they run, in Why Digital Transformation Stalls in Facilities Management. The same dynamic is at work here.
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Interestingly, some environments never settled into that pattern. Healthcare, airports and five-star hospitality run tighter checks, not because their providers are more diligent, but because a missed standard there carries a cost that's immediate and visible. Those environments show that tighter, more frequent oversight is operationally possible when the consequences justify the investment. In these environments, that tighter oversight has traditionally relied heavily on more frequent manual checks. Technology is now making continuous, automated visibility increasingly practical at scale, in settings that never had the same consequences to justify that level of manual investment.
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What does the periodic pattern actually miss?

A periodic audit does two things: it samples a moment in time, and it stops there. It tells you what a washroom looked like at 11am on inspection day. It doesn't tell you what it looked like the rest of the week.
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That's really two separate gaps, not one.

The first is a visibility gap: not knowing whether a standard was held on any given day, only on the day someone happened to check.
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The second is a response gap: the inspection itself doesn't necessarily provide a structured way to confirm that a shortfall was fixed, and stayed fixed, rather than resurfacing at the next inspection.
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The question, then, isn't whether periodic audits should disappear. It's whether they should carry the entire burden of proving that a continuously delivered service is being continuously maintained. That is where continuous quality control changes the model. Instead of checking quality occasionally, it's built into how the work is already verified. When a task is completed, the person checking it can capture evidence, a photo, note or timestamp, as part of the same verification step. That evidence is then automatically checked against the agreed standard as it comes in. If there's a shortfall, it can be routed for correction and verified once it's fixed.
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Why this matters for asset owners and FM service providers

From an asset owner's perspective, a building is judged on more than whether its systems work. Cleanliness, common-area conditions and responsiveness to issues all shape how people experience an asset. As expectations rise, they move down the service chain. Asset owners need to deliver a better experience, and FM service providers need to deliver the operational consistency that makes it possible.
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For asset owners, continuous quality control means knowing whether the service standard they're paying for is actually being maintained. For FM service providers, it means being able to prove that it is, and to demonstrate that they're actively managing quality rather than simply reporting completed work. Knowing lets an asset owner act before a standard slips into a complaint. Proving lets a provider walk into a renewal conversation with evidence of consistent delivery, not just a completed checklist, and with issues that were caught and closed rather than simply logged.
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As expectations rise, consistent service will become less of a differentiator and more of a baseline. The differentiator will be the ability to maintain that standard continuously, detect when it slips, and prove what happened next.
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If periodic audits are still your primary view of soft FM quality, the question is simple: what's happening between them? Start a conversation with Xempla about what continuous quality control could look like across your contracts.
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FAQs

What is quality control in soft FM?

Quality control in soft FM is the process of verifying that services such as cleaning, security and reception are being delivered to the agreed standard, not simply that scheduled tasks have been completed.
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How often should soft FM quality be checked?

There's no universal frequency. It depends on the service, environment, contract, and risk level. Periodic audits are common but only provide a snapshot. Where a standard needs to hold continuously, ongoing quality control provides visibility between formal inspections that periodic checks alone can't.
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What is the difference between a soft FM audit and quality control?

A soft FM audit is typically a scheduled, periodic review of a sample of sites or records. Quality control is the broader, ongoing process of confirming that delivered service continues to meet the agreed standard, something an audit alone can only partially capture.
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What is quality control in soft FM?

A periodic audit can only confirm what the standard looked like at the moment it was checked. It can't confirm whether that standard was consistently maintained in the weeks or months between checks, or whether a shortfall was ever caught and fixed.
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Why are periodic soft FM audits insufficient on their own?

Service quality in soft FM is typically measured through scheduled audits, SLA performance, task completion records, and occupant feedback. Continuous quality control adds a layer to this by checking whether the agreed standard is being maintained between formal inspections, and whether any identified shortfalls are corrected.