Better to best: Improving customer service in your landscape business

There is only one 'Best' of anything.

What’s makes you better when competing with the other guy in the green industry when it comes to Customer Service? What defines the best landscape business customer service?

Surely faster and better responsiveness is near the top of the list. Almost nothing succeeds in creating loyalty like quickly, happily and professionally fixing a problem or responding to a request.

The Best Are More Than Better

However, responsiveness while making you better may not make you the best! What do the best do when it comes to customer service? In other words, are they better than just responsive?  They are… they anticipate problems and/or requests before customer experiences them for themselves.

Now while it is not always practical or even desirable to anticipate everything, there is a level at which it is superior and creates customer value and fierce loyalty. How do they do it? Client budgets are one of type of best practice that embodies and delivers on the anticipation promise.

Client Budget

At renewal time they not only provide a renewal budget, they provide a list of improvement and remediation ideas that educates the client regarding WHAT the client can do, and HOW MUCH it will cost.

Process

At renewal time, provide a simple 1-2 page document outlining the costs and benefits of the ideas with photos and text. We can discuss and display the format of this document in a future article.

Benefit

Assuming your competitor is not doing this, you—with a simple document—get to demonstrate in concrete terms your superior customer care and your expertise.

Keys

The keys are:

1. Produce a professional document with simple and accurate information.
2. Deliver it to the customer with the proper description of your intent, your reasoning, and the benefit to the customer.
3. Train (and re-train) your Account Managers to become expert at it… the document is nothing without the salesmanship that brings it to life.

If you want to better retention there is no better way than building fierce loyalty by anticipating the customers needs and providing ideas about how they can maximize the value of their investment in their landscape.

If you want to be the best, provide client budgets.

Want to learn more about how to be the best?