Dealing with lawn care customers is often a tricky balance at best. You, as a lawn care business owner, must attempt to understand the customer’s expectations of a job you are bidding and then balance those expectations with the amount you charge for your services.
As careful as you are to balance a customer’s expectations with the price you are charging for a particular job, you will likely run into an occasional customer who is determined to be dissatisfied with any level of service you offer. Ugh…those customers are annoying and they can derail an otherwise perfect day. A perpetual complainer wastes your time and drains your enthusiasm.
As you gain experience in your lawn care business, you will learn to watch for warning signs during the initial customer contact and during the bidding and estimation process. Proper interpretations of warning signs will help you avoid problem customers. We are not speaking about an otherwise good customer who has an occasional gripe about your service. Instead we want to help you avoid problematic customers who have never ending streams of complaints and continuously misinterpret the services you agree to offer.
We recently had a problem customer. The annoying fact is that we gave this customer the exact same level of service that we offered our other customers. We spent a great deal of time attempting to understand the customer’s complaint and determining if we had done something wrong. To our dismay, the customer simply turned out to be one of those whiners in life that are never satisfied with anything. I’m sure you know those type of people; they always feel that someone is doing them wrong and no matter what you do, you can’t help them to see the value in the product and service you offer.
After almost 20 years associated with the Lawn Care Industry we feel we have developed a “pretty good” strategy at avoiding perpetual complainers. However, ocassionally, one or two problem customers get through our screening process.
Do you feel that you get more than your fair share of complaining customers? If you are providing great service at a fair price, maybe the problem is your screening process. To learn more about how to properly interview lawn care customers, read our main webpage about our Lawn Care Business training package. We have included a great section showing you how to identify and weed out problem customers.
Learn more on our main webpage:
http://www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com
Start A Lawn Care Business
We have found that the overwhelming majority of our customer are very willing to pay a fair price for equally fair service.