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Are you a pest control business owner who is looking to increase the number of pest control leads you bring in? Are you working to increase customer engagement across your pest control brand? Or are you hoping to improve customer retention among your existing customers?
Whether one or all of these things is true, you can accomplish them by improving your brand’s overall customer experience. In this blog, we’ll talk about what it means to offer a great customer experience for your pest control business’ current and potential customers.
Improved Customer Experience for Pest Control
Before we dive into how your pest control company can create a better customer experience, let’s review what it means to have a positive experience, and a negative one, as a pest control customer.
The pest control customer experience (CX) is a combination of all of the customer interactions and engagements (e.g. personal experience, digital experience, product experience, etc.) that a current or prospective customer has with your company throughout each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Pest control positive customer experience: A positive experience for your pest control customers is one that is memorable, valuable, worthwhile, and/or beneficial to them. Good customer experiences may lead to pest control customer loyalty.
- Pest control bad customer experience: A poor experience for your pest control customers may be one that isn’t seamless, includes challenges, and/or doesn’t lead to the client feeling delighted.
Improved Customer Experience for Pest Control: CX Strategy
The process of improving the customer experience for your pest control company entails the creation of a customer experience strategy — a CX strategy will help your pest control business consistently improve the customer experience. Depending on how big/small and new/old your pest control business is, you may need to customize some of the following steps more than others.
1. Understand your pest control company’s buyer personas and customer journey.
The most important part of your customer experience strategy and your ability to improve CX is understanding your buyer personas (or customer personas) on a deep level. By learning about customer needs, customer behavior, and their personal information such as location and age, you’ll gain the insight you need to make each part of the buyer’s journey delightful for those prospects and current clients. In other words, you’ll have the exact information needed to increase the number of qualified pest control leads you bring in and convert.
After developing personas, perform pest control customer journey mapping. This entails creating a storyline of all touchpoints and engagements that an individual has with your pest control brand throughout the customer journey. It takes into account both in-person and digital customer experiences and offers a look at how your customers perceive your brand and interact with it throughout all stages of the journey.
2. Invest in a customer experience management tool for your pest control business.
Customer experience management is the process of maintaining and executing all aspects of your CX strategy — your pest control business can simplify the process by leveraging a CX tool. Depending on the customer experience management tool or home services marketing software that your team invests in, you may have easy access to your customer data. This includes customer profiles and customer stories, as well as tools to help you survey customers, decipher your CX success, and offer customer support.
3. Train your pest control employees.
To achieve improved customer experience for pest control, you must train all of your employees on what that means at your company. How do you treat and engage pest control leads? What is consistent across every service and interaction your brand has with prospects and clients? What does it look like to enable customer success at your company? These are the types of questions you must answer prior to training your employees to ensure consistency.
Consider setting up a formal day or two of training when you bring on a new pest control employee to make sure their interactions and service appointments are on brand and will meet or exceed customer expectations.
4. Create and maintain a pest control contact center.
Whether or not you have a full-time customer service team member, establish and maintain an effective contact center. Individuals running the pest control contact center respond to and manage customer needs across channels including phone, in-person, and digital (e.g. email, social media, and web).
A contact center is a key component in your pest control business’ ability to offer stellar customer service — and delightful customer service and experiences increase the chances of positive reviews, word-of-mouth marketing, and loyalty.
5. Personalize pest control outreach and follow-up.
Personalize all of your pest control outreach and follow up including email marketing and other forms of digital and/or automated communication (e.g. bot on your website, social media direct messaging. etc.). These efforts make a big impact on customer experience, loyalty, and retention — especially in a world where buyers have many options across service providers and the pest control brands they choose to work with.
6. Measure your pest control CX success.
By surveying your pest control clients, you’ll be able to develop a deep understanding of the reasons behind any customer feedback you receive and overall customer satisfaction and sentiment. Conducting pest control surveys will also help your team identify the most common reasons for brand loyalty and which traits are shared among your pest control business’s most loyal customers. When it comes to surveying your pest control customers, you may use one of your current marketing or CX tools or a survey tool.
If you’re unsure where to get started, begin by conducting the following three types of surveys:
Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey
Net promoter score tells you on a scale from 1-10 how likely a current pest control customer is to recommend your pest control business to a friend. Based on where their rating falls on the scale, they are defined as detractors, passives, or promotors. This is a clear indicator of how good the customer experience was for your pest control leads and customers since you can assume they’d only refer the best service providers to members of their networks.
Customer Satisfaction Score Survey
Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to ask multiple questions to understand how your pest control leads and customers perceive your brand. They measure customer sentiment as it relates to their interactions with your brand including completed services as well as how they think about your company.
Customer Effort Score Survey
Customer effort score is used to better understand customer satisfaction by telling you how much effort was exerted by a customer to get what they need from your pest control business on a scale of 1-5 or 1-7. This may be about any effort exerted while resolving their challenges such as how difficult it was to sign up for a pest control service or get in touch with a rep to have their questions answered.
In addition to measuring your pest control success by conducting the above CX surveys, you can also measure other customer engagement metrics regularly to understand your CX success. Here are a few examples:
- Pest control customer lifetime value: CLV tells you how much revenue you can expect from a single pest control lead/customer throughout their time as a client.
- Customer retention: Customer retention is your ability to retain customers over time. A happy customer comes back for more business in the future, and customer retention gives you a look at how many of these delighted customers are choosing to return for repeat business and/or continue engaging with your brand after a service.
- Cost of Acquisition: CAC tells you how much your pest control business spends when acquiring a new customer. This includes everything marketing activity and sales efforts related to acquiring and converting a pest control lead into a paying customer.
Improve the Customer Experience Among Pest Control Leads and Customers
Improved pest control customer experience has the power to drive customer loyalty, brand advocacy, and growth. Establish your pest control customer experience strategy to drive the results you care about most.
Want to learn how Scorpion, a home services marketing tool, can help your pest control business improve the customer experience?
