Building Customer Loyalty Through Excellent Landscaping Service

It’s no surprise that the landscaping industry is competitive. Therefore, to stay ahead, you’ll want to build a base of landscaping customer loyalty.

Loyalty; The Key to Growth

It is important to care about your customer relationships because it can cost 7 to 10 times more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. 

Loyal customers are also key to your company growth. For example, clients will keep you in mind for their next projects or other needs such as lawn maintenance, tree care, disease, weed or insect control.

They can further help increase your sales by making personal recommendations, about your services, to others. When happy customers provide such recommendations, the probability of a prospect becoming a customer increases by 5.5 times. 

Building Loyalty

First, you’ll want to understand which of your customer relationships are worth nurturing with time and money. Then, you must go above and beyond to surpass their expectations with excellent customer service and by continuously satisfying their needs. 

Only a few dissatisfying instances will put clients on a fast track toward your competitors. For example, 60% of people will switch their business to another landscaping company after receiving poor service two to three times.

You can use this simple formula to remember what’s important and why:

Providing Excellent Service

Here are some of the best ways to continuously provide excellent service.

1. Be Proactive

Being proactive means offering help to customers before they ask for it. This can take the form of providing recommendations for different products or design ideas. However, to do so effectively, you must have a clear understanding of their needs.

Having a clean, updated and easy-to-use website is another way of doing this. Make it as simple and as fast as possible for customers to access information about the services you offer. You can also include a chat box for clients to address their questions live and hassle-free! 

2. Know your Customers

Anyone will appreciate a personalized service. Therefore, show your customers that you are taking the time to get to know them by remembering their name. It is also good practice to note previous conversations so that you can reference them at a later point. Clients don’t want to have to readdress their needs and concerns at every interaction and doing so will also add a personal touch.

It is useful to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, such as HubSpot. A CRM system allows you to keep track of all of your customer interactions, each individual’s specific needs and questions etc. You can also use the data to gather insights and determine which clients provide value and which don’t.

3. Be There When They Need You

It is best practice to return phone calls or emails within 24 hours. In the meantime, you can send an automated response to let customers know that you received their inquiry and are working on getting back to them. This may seem simple, but it is effective at making clients feel that you acknowledged their request and that you will be happy to help shortly.

Also, if customers come to you with a problem regarding your work, quickly take responsibility and fix the issue in the most honest and helpful way. Transparency is very important in creating lasting relationships!

4. Conduct Surveys

Asking your clients for feedback is essential to improving your service and your work. Therefore, take the time to create a satisfaction survey for customers to fill out upon completion of the job. 

The survey should be a mix of ranking and open-ended questions to gather feedback on your customer’s satisfaction with the job. Here are a few questions you may want to ask:

1. How satisfied are you with the time frame that was needed to complete the project?
2. How satisfied are you with our response time to your inquiries? In what ways can we improve?
3. How likely are you to recommend our company to others?
4. How was your experience with us overall? Would you think of us for a future project?

There are many free and easy-to-use platforms for creating, sending out, and gathering data from surveys such as Google Forms and Survey Monkey.

Feel free to provide an incentive for people to fill out your survey, such as the possibility of winning a prepaid Mastercard.

Most importantly, don’t forget to apply the feedback that you received from the landscaping customer service survey.This shows your clients that you value their opinions.

5. Say Thank You

After a job is done, send a personalized email to your landscaping customer thanking them for choosing your company. At this point, you can also send them the satisfaction survey.

Also, you’ll want to show special appreciation to loyal customers. Simply offering a discount or a free estimation on their next project can keep them happy and continue to build your relationship. 

Lastly, creating a loyalty program can be a really effective tool to engage long-term clients. This program offers exclusive perks and discounts that help show appreciation to your customer’s continued business. It is also a way to promote your different services and provide personalized communications to your best clients.

Essentially, the key to gaining long-term customers is to surpass their expectations, by showing that you care for them through excellent service. In the end, the growth advantages for your company greatly outweigh the effort and money spent building these relationships.

Are there other key actions that you are taking to ensure customer loyalty?

Read up on how to hedge unreasonable landscaping customer service demands and how to share bad news with landscaping customers.