Best Practices: Customer Service: Keep a smile on their face
1 Feb, 2005 By: Bruce Wilson Landscape ManagementThe key to any service business is a high level of customer satisfaction that leads to repeat business and business referrals. The landscape maintenance business is no different and has some unique challenges. In thinking about customer satisfaction, there are at least four key elements:
1. Consistent core service delivery. This involves making sure that your core maintenance service is as close to flawless in its delivery as possible. Nothing fancy here, just take care of the basics very well. Make sure that crews are trained and that you have established best practices so that your service is delivered the same way day in and day out.
If your basic service happens on time and is done right, and the customer has confidence that it will be done right each time, they're generally satisfied. If you have repeated glitches, they'll always be looking for what's wrong instead of assuming everything is okay.
One of the unique challenges to this business is that we depend on relatively unskilled labor to make up a significant part of our labor pool, so we know things go wrong. It's well worth the effort to establish best practices and routines of service that become habits of your work teams. This mitigates the unskilled labor problem to a degree.
2. Meeting customer expectations. The first and most important part of this piece is understanding your customers' expectations. This is part of the sales process as well as having enough ongoing contact with the customer to understand when their expectations change. It's a fact that many customers' level of expectations increases with time during your business relationship.
Our employees in this industry fall into a common trap of over-promising in an effort to make customers happy. This usually starts the relationship down a road of distrust. It's really important that you do a lot to shape customer expectations, and usually we're at least partially responsible when we reach the point of saying that our customers' expectations are unrealistic.
3. Responding to customer requests in a timely fashion. Apart from the core service, customers have additional needs. How we respond is another key element of customer satisfaction. Here I think there should be a good system for tracking customer requests, and a system should be set up for making sure those requests get a timely followup. This is a core responsibility of the person managing the customer relationship, and there should be good accountability around it.
4. Building a relationship, preferably personal. Sometimes it isn't enough to do good work, meet expectations and be responsive. Service problems arise sooner or later that may or may not be your fault. This is where having a relationship with your customer saves the day. If there is no relationship, it's too easy for the customer to say, "I need to change." But if there is something personal to the relationship, they're more apt to try to work through it. It may be a low bid from another contractor at renewal time, but a personal relationship might be enough to overcome it, or at least get you the last look.
— The author is a partner with entrepreneur Tom Oyler in the Wilson-Oyler Group, which offers consulting services. He is also the Director for the Symbiot Landscape Network. Visit
www.wilson-oyler.com.
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