Will Kelly (YouTube video) explains practical steps to reduce customer churn in lawn care: monitor complaints, callbacks and "yellow slips" as primary churn drivers; implement a short post-visit SMS feedback survey (2–3 questions, ~30 seconds) asking for a 1–5 rating; treat ratings below about 3 as needing remediation and follow up by phone on any rating short of five to learn and improve crew performance.
Questions this video answers
About 30 seconds.
Two or three questions.
A 1–5 rating scale.
Ratings below about 3 should be addressed; any rating less than 5 should prompt a phone follow-up to learn why.
Chapters
Are you asking how to retain the customers as long as possible or asking how to maximize a lifetime value or both? It would just be more so, just like, so that they stay for the longest period of time. One of the biggest indicators to reduce the amount of customers that are leaving out of the back door is really monitoring kind of complaints, callbacks, yellow slips. That is the, I believe, number one reason why your churn will be high. So I think getting that under control took us many years to really dial that in. The next phase of kind of reducing the churn would be setting up some kind of feedback survey to the customer so that way you can get that real valuable information. One of the things we just implemented recently was upon a visit completion, it basically texts the customer and says, hey, can you take 30 seconds to give us a feedback review? And I think there's like maybe two or three questions on it and it just says like, hey, rate your service one out of five and ideally anything below like a three, like we definitely need to address and like figure out even a four, what could we do better? But it gives them that opportunity that it's like, hey, we value your feedback, we want your feedback. If this wasn't a five star service, please just let us know. We want to use this to train our crews and get better. And then if anybody gives you anything but a five star, I would get on the phone with them and just say, hey, why? And just really dig a little bit deeper to help build a better process and a better system to deliver a five star service every single time.
