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Become customer-centric
1 Apr, 2006 By: Charles Simon Landscape ManagementWhen a Philadelphia-area landscape company asked its customers, "how are we doing?" it found out a lot more than it expected
The customer's voice started out cool and restrained but soon escalated into a volcano of emotion as he recounted what had happened earlier that day. He said one of our workers, zipping his zero-turn around a corner of the property, sprayed his wife and her pet dog with grass clippings. "Unbelievable," is the last word the angry client sputtered before he hung up, and almost before I could croak out an apology.
Hard as it is to believe, customers do sometimes get upset with us. Screw-ups happen in the landscape business.
Thankfully most are not as dramatic as the above example, meaning we almost always get an opportunity to rescue a displeased customer. How we respond to customer dissatisfaction and, better yet, discover and correct service malfunctions before they cause customers to cancel, profoundly affect our success.
Before we continue, let's all agree on certain points. First, we must have customers to be in business. Second, the more customers ("good" customers) that we retain from season to season, the better our chances of being profitable and growing our company. When we lose customers it takes time, effort and money to replace them. Our goal then is to retain a high percentage of those customers that contribute to our success. Stable, profitable small service companies such as maintenance and lawn care companies generally want to retain at least 85% of their clients from one season to the next.
Get with the system
While we all recognize that the customer is our No. 1 focus, how many of us have systems to respond to complaints and service shortcomings?
How many of us take a proactive approach to customer care by gauging and monitoring clients' expectations and satisfaction?
Admittedly, most of us can't afford a full-time employee dedicated to customer relations. Even so, we can create simple systems to measure customer satisfaction. This gives us a chance to discover what they like about our services and also what they don't like before it's too late.
Sometimes it's easy to know why a customer is upset. Grass clippings spraying all over a woman and her poodle is a good reason. Most of the time the reasons aren't so obvious.
The system that we use in our company is simple but has several components: We each send each customer an annual survey; we include a quarterly "How are we doing?" insert with our invoices; we respond quickly to calls; and we send each customer an annual "thank you," either a gift or a special message.
Survey says
The survey responses have been instructive and in some cases surprising. We're using them as a road map for better customer relations.
Before we began surveying our customers we took it for granted that we were doing a great job. The responses told us that, in most respects, we were. That encouraged us. More than 95% of our clients told us they were satisfied with our landscaping work. But the survey told us that three other areas within our company needed work — prompt return of customers' calls, customer communications and invoicing, which several clients described as sometimes inaccurate, arriving late and being poorly detailed.
We heeded the survey results and went to work.
First, instead of allowing calls to go to the answering machine and trying to return them at the end of the day, we hired a person to staff the office and respond to callers.
Next, we scrapped our homemade invoice system based on Microsoft Works and installed Quickbooks and a lawn service database package to provide detailed and consistent invoices. The office person entered the work completed each day into the system so our invoices were accurate and got mailed on time.
We also learned that several customers were uncomfortable with the appearance of our field staff. That hadn't been high on our list of priorities. After all, our guys work hard, long days and we weren't too concerned with their pierced jewelry, tattoos, beards and clothes.
Seeking to make customers more comfortable with our employees, we decided on company uniforms and required workers to remove or cover piercing jewelry, and cover tattoos if possible.
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