How We Reduced Complaints by 70%

Hey, everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com today I'm going to be sharing with you our yellow slip policy and showing exactly what that piece of paper looks like. Some of you have asked for exactly the design and the template, so I wanted to show you it in person. If you're listening to the podcast, might want to watch this one on Facebook or YouTube so you can actually see the design of the paper I'm holding right now. And we're going to walk through why we do it. The reason we did this was because I was tired of having so many complaints. So when we talk about dealing with complaints today, it's actually about dealing with less complaints, because you're always going to have complaints in this industry, lawn care and landscaping. The reason for that is because it's a very subjective piece of work that you're doing. You know, one person might love the way you do the lawn and that you do the stripes a certain way. Someone else might hate that way, hate that certain way that you edge. Other person might love it. Same thing with landscaping. One person loves the landscaping that you do. Literally, their next door neighbor thinks it's the worst thing ever. So because of the subjective nature of our industry and the client satisfaction being so subjective, you're going to have complaints. It's hard to create. Even if you create a perfect system that pumps out the same result every single time, there's going to be people that still don't like that perfect system, even if it is absolutely perfect. And then we hire humans, and they are not going to make that perfect system perfect all the time. So either your employees are making mistakes or they're doing exactly what they should be doing. But the customers have a different point of view or different way of what they want done on their property. And so you're going to have complaints. And so about a year ago, a little bit less than a year ago, I was tired of having these complaints. And then what would happen is the customer would call the office. The office would then set up a time for an estimator or myself to go and talk to the customer, see what was wrong, resolve the issue. And what was bad about that was that the office never actually really well, they might have communicated with the person that was there and asked them about what happened or whatever. But that individual that actually made the mistake on the job or was servicing the property when the unsatisfactory service occurred never actually had to go back and fix the problem that they created, whether that be just in the mind of the customer, their perception of what should have been done, or whether there's an actual mistake and a lapse in quality. And so what ended up happening is no one was accountable because now the people on the front lines doing the work, if there was a problem or there's an issue with the work they did, they knew that their supervisor or that someone, you know, more experienced or myself was going to go to the customer's house and resolve and fix their problem. And so what we ended up doing is like, why don't we put the accountability back on the frontline staff? And this is the problem I see with so many people having quality control people and the owners being the one that always responded to the complaints, is that your frontline workers never have a direct connection with the customers and they never have a sense of accountability because they know that if they make a mistake, someone else is there to pick up their slack. So we started doing about a year and a half, almost a year ago, was created what we call the yellow slip system. So this is a yellow slip. I'm getting a little bit closer here to the video camera so you can see it. This is what it looks like, basically. At the top it has the date. This is what is going to be filled out by the office when a complaint comes in. So usually a complaint is going to come in via a phone call or an email. Something happens, someone broke a window, usually we catch that obviously sooner, but little things like missing a certain part of the lawn or any sort of complaint whatsoever. They parked in the wrong spot, they forgot to close a gate, whatever it might be, the office is going to get that complaint, they're going to fill in the date and they're going to fill in the client name, they're going to fill in the address serviced, and then just briefly what the complaint is. So maybe they missed a certain part of the lawn. Let's just go along with that for the example. They're going to fill in there. You know, Mrs. Jones called, this is her address, and her complaint was that we missed a strip of lawn in the back alley. And then what's going to happen is.

The person who serviced this property, the office is going to put their name down here. So we have this at the bottom, we have it owned by. And the reason we talk about that is in relation to extreme ownership by Jocko Willink, about owning everything that you do, owning the jobs and really making them your own. So owned by the office is going to put someone's name there. Then what happens is this Piece of paper is going to go in. We have two different categories on our table, and the table is right underneath all the keys. So where all the truck keys are hanged up on the wall. Right underneath that, we have two different spots where these yellow slips can go. The first spot is called 48 hour yellow slip. The next spot is called resolved yellow slip. So when they come in at the end of the day, if they see a yellow slip in the 48 hour yellow slip folder or on the counter there, they're right away looking to see if it's their name. And if it's not, they're going to kind of pick on the person that does have that yellow slip. And so what we're trying to do there is create a very public, making it very public as to who made a mistake, where they made a mistake, and how we can all learn from it. And again, the reason we're doing this is so that people take accountability for the work that they're doing. They do take ownership of their jobs. So instead of just mowing the lawn and leaving, they'll actually take a couple extra seconds because they don't want this yellow slip to be in front of the entire team saying that they made a mistake. It's a little bit embarrassing and they may have to be accountable. They take the extra two seconds, look at the property, make sure they didn't miss the strip on the back alley. Maybe they take a couple extra seconds and make sure they read the job notes to make sure the yellow slip doesn't happen. So we start out in that 48 hour yellow slip area. We just have two spots labeled on the counter. And the office will fill out what they can when the complaint comes in, put it in that 48 hour yellow slip area. And then the whole crew, when they come in, they're looking to see if it's their yellow slip. Now, let's assume that this is my yellow slip and I made a mistake. I am going to pick this up because it has my name on it. Usually within the last day, it's going to be a customer I recognize if I service their property. And within 48 hours, that's why it's called the 48 hour yellow slip. Within 48 hours, I have to resolve this yellow slip. It has to go from the 48 hour yellow slip category over onto the other part of the table that says resolved yellow slip. And basically what it means to resolve it is I gotta go back to the customer's address, I have to talk to the customer, and I have to Write down in this area that says resolution. I have to fill that in. So maybe the resolution is just to make sure that we mow the strip along the back alley. But whatever it is, that resolution needs to be wrote in here. And then I need to sign this through my signature on this yellow slip on the bottom part where it says owned by. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it in the area that says resolved yellow slips. At the next team meeting, any yellow slips that might be in that resolved yellow slip category are going to be picked up and whoever owned it is going to then talk to the entire team about what they did wrong, how they resolved it, and what the team can do better to serve that client or that property. So the reason again that we do this is that we are creating this sense of accountability. The team member is going to look a little bit longer, going to take an extra quick glance at the lawn or make sure they're offering that higher level of service to make sure they're not getting called back because they don't want to be embarrassed, number one. And it's very embarrassing to have to go back to the customer and talk to them face to face and explain and then take their complaint and maybe they're mad and de escalate them and then do the service extra. And so we pay our guys to go back and do that. Like they don't have to do that after hours. They are on the clock and getting paid to go back to the customer's house. However, what we're trying to create is accountability to the customer in that they do not want this yellow slip to be in front of all the team. Then they have to go back and be embarrassed by going back to the customer and explaining things to them and resolving it, fixing the problem, coming back to the shop and the next team meeting, they have to talk in front of the entire team and explain what happened, explain what they did to resolve the issue. And basically it's not public humiliation. That's not what I'm trying to get at. But I wanted to create that sense of accountability. So I'm not always just fixing their mistakes or the office just always fixing people's mistakes, taking blame for things, giving free things away to make up for their problems and their mistakes, and then never see the consequences of their poor quality work. And so when we have done, when we implemented this, it reduced our complaints by 2/3, over 2/3. About 70% of our complaints disappeared because of this one thing, because it's A whole lot easier. And we talked about walkthroughs with our landscaping jobs, our cleanups, for example. So one day cleanups can be very lucrative in our industry. This is when you're gonna, like, weed beds, edge the lawn, trim up some bushes, you know, do just some, like, clean a property cleanup. Very lucrative. However, if you don't do a walkthrough, many times you'll get a call back because a certain tree wasn't done a certain way, or a bed wasn't done all over the property line, or lots of little things that, you know, forgot to get some cleanup in the leaves or whatever. Some weeds were missed. So we really stress our frontline workers that they have to do a walkthrough. And that walkthrough is going to entail them talking to the customer, walking around the entire property, and then having the customer say, yep, everything looks good. Thank you so much. And then we know we're never going to have to come back. And the clients, or so the team knows they're not going to get a yellow slip because they have done a walkthrough. And so it's not very easy, usually, for a frontline employee to want to do a walkthrough, want to talk to the customer face to face. But by implementing this yellow slip strategy, we tell them, look, it's a whole lot less embarrassing to have to talk to them and get any sort of complaints out of the way at the property where we can just fix them right away. It's a whole lot easier to do that than to be embarrassed by having to come back the next day, explain why you did something wrong, or go back to the property, have a yellow slip, have to explain what you did wrong to the entire team. And so creating that level of accountability is how I believe you should start dealing with complaints. Obviously, you got to create systems and procedures to make sure that those complaints don't happen again, by having job notes on each property, by training your people, et cetera. However, I would say the fastest fix is to make sure that the level of accountability to the customer is brought all the way back down to your frontline employees. This is something I talk about a lot within my organization, and I'm going to start talking a lot about more on the podcast, because it's absolutely changed our business by making the frontline employees, the guys who start, like their first day of work, if they're out on someone's property, they're accountable directly to the customer. There's no layer of management. There's no Office staff, there's no one, no manager in between them and the customer. They have four frontline access. They're going to talk to the customer, they're going to make sure they get sign offs on those walkthroughs. And if they do make a mistake, they're going to get a yellow slip and they're going to have to go make that right with the customer, one on one. The other benefit to this is that when you have a yellow slip system like we do and we get back to them within a day, 48 hours at the very longest, when you have that system, we find that some of our best reviews and our best online comments are, are from the customers that actually we made a mistake on their property, but then resolved it within a very short amount of time. And they're wowed by the fact that that frontline employee comes back to them, knocks on the door, talks to them face to face, makes it right. And many times they're going to sign up for another service because we haven't had that face to face connection maybe for several months. Maybe they usually just, we just mow and go and they don't see us very often and all of a sudden we go back to fix something. They're wowed by the fact that we fix our problems, that we are accountable right from the frontline staff all the way up to the owner. And so we make sure that we inbreed that within our culture and all of a sudden they start buying our services more like, oh, you know what? I also, you know, while you're here, can I get an estimate for the gutters or can I get an estimate for trimming these other bushes or I'm building a property and you start to get customer intelligence and be able to get a lot of feedback from the customer. And so these yellow slips, yes, they're negative, yes, they're complaints. But some of our biggest raving fans and customers come from people that got a yellow slip and they saw how fast we dealt with it, how just obsessed we are with the customer and their experience and making things right when we do make a mistake. I really truly believe it's like the baseball analogy. The highlights that are shown on ESPN and everywhere else are the big diving catches with the balls over the wall and someone dives over the, puts their hand over the wall and catches it and robs someone of a home run.

But really at the end of the day, the pitcher made a mistake, they allowed a home run at the end of the day. But it was the great defense of that person in the outfield that was able to rob that home run. And that's how I look at complaints. They're a big mistake. Maybe it's a big mistake on your part as a company and as your brand. And maybe as your employees, maybe they make a big mistake. Like the picture. He made a big mistake by throwing the pitch right down the middle of the plate and the batter hit it out of the park. But if you have great customer service and you have a great office staff and you have this yellow slip system in place, that can be the amazing defense that makes a highlight play that actually is caught in the memory of your customer, that's what they're gonna remember. They're not gonna remember the big mistake as much as the diving catch and the catch that you snag it and you're able to actually make a highlight out of something that's actually very negative. So that's how I look at customer service. That's how I look at when we have to fix complaints. That's how I deal with complaints. And the yellow slip system has been absolutely invaluable for our business. Like I said, 70% of reduction in complaints. You're always going to have them, but you want to reduce the amount of them that you get by creating accountability at your frontline staff. So thank you all so much. Again, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com if you haven't already like me on Facebook, just at Landscape Business course. I'm going to be doing more live videos just for 15 minutes here and there when I get some time and answer your questions live. So check out the Facebook page, so many of you have been on there. And also the private, the private group that we have. I'll put the link below. But that link also allow you to ask questions and get more integrated with all the other listeners. So I look forward to seeing you there again. Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com.