For most landscaping businesses, long-term success depends on a solid customer base and customers who call back year after year. Those who stand out against the competition aren’t just able to provide valuable landscaping services. They also have the soft skills — such as communication and flexibility — needed to build strong relationships with customers to keep them coming back.
“Today, poor customer service is all too common, despite the fact that we live in a society that values instant gratification, with information readily available and deliveries arriving the next day,” says Michael Todd, owner of The Todd Group, a landscape services company in Far Hills, New Jersey. “To deliver excellent customer service, it’s crucial to meet your commitments within the promised time frame. As service providers, our responsibilities include consistent communication, understanding client needs, proactive follow-up, and ensuring client satisfaction.”
Beyond the Basics
Companies that focus solely on offering quality landscaping work probably won’t be as successful as those that offer good work paired with positive relationship skills. Most customers have many options for landscaping services, and they’re more likely to stick with providers they trust and with whom they feel comfortable communicating.
To improve retention and strengthen relationships, David McCary, owner of Seattle Sustainable Landscapes, based in Seattle, Washington, prioritizes communication and consistency. In the residential landscape design-build and maintenance space, communication is typically the most frequent complaint, he says. Because most landscape leaders are incredibly busy, client communication may get delayed or never happen at all.
“When a homeowner is doing a yard renovation, they need to trust your process and that you are going to do what you say you do, and being responsive and clear is huge for that experience,” McCary says. “On the yard care side, it is very similar for a different reason. Most of the time, the customer could do what we do for yard care. They may be slower and worse, but they could weed the garden beds and mow the lawn. They contract us to put their life on autopilot. They are also very busy and are buying back some of their time so that they can continue to enjoy the space. Be consistent and communicate.”
It’s important to remember that communication is a two-way street — it includes both talking and listening.
“Work to understand the client’s vision and needs for their project, as opposed to selling them whatever you can sell them,” says Weston Zimmerman, who worked as a landscaper for 15 years before co-founding SynkedUp, a landscape services software company based in Altoona, Pennsylvania. “Be relationship-focused, not transaction-focused.”
An important part of communicating about a landscaping project is setting proper expectations, “such as just how bad their yard will get torn up or when they will be billed, or even that adjustment to the job will generate a change order,” Zimmerman says. “Explaining what customers can expect rather than just saying, ‘Sure, I can do that,’ can eliminate 90% of the drama.”
Growing Relationships With the Business
As a landscaping business grows, customer relationships are likely to change. In some cases, those changes may mean more established customers need extra communication or special treatment.
“Frankly, long-lasting relationships can be the most difficult, depending on where you are in the business maturity,” McCary says. “When a company is started, it is typically an owner who works in the field all day, and those initial clients can be used to working directly with the owner and paying way under current market rates as the owner typically doesn’t have many expenses when they get started. With that history, it can be difficult as rates rise and crews change as you go from a one-person company to a 15-person company, then to a 100-person company. Our business today is very different than when it started nine years ago.”
To encourage customers to come along with the business as it grows, owners may need to spend extra time communicating and gauging expectations, especially with customers who have a history with the business. At The Todd Group, landscapers make a habit of regularly checking in with customers “to ask if we are meeting their needs and if there is anything we can do to enhance their service experience,” Todd says, and customers always appreciate the follow-up.
Managing Troubled Customer Relationships
Even the best relationships experience ups and downs, including customer relationships. There are often warning signs that a customer relationship may be in trouble. The warning sign may be as simple as a slight change in behavior, Todd says. For example, a typically communicative customer may stop chatting, or a usually happy customer may begin nitpicking the work or pointing out errors.
“While there are many factors that may impact a customer’s response time or behavior, if you feel the relationship is beginning to change, simply inquire,” Todd says. “If you sense the relationship is beginning to shift, it’s important to address it promptly. A phone call is recommended, as tone can be easily misinterpreted in emails or text messages.”
When you realize that a customer relationship is in trouble, the first step is to acknowledge the issue and try to resolve it, McCary says.
“That may mean having a crew spend extra time on-site during the next visit, it may mean stopping by for an additional visit, it may mean moving that property to another crew,” he says. “The best thing to do is start with listening so that the client feels genuinely heard, and the next step is to remedy the reasonable requests and set proper expectations for the unreasonable requests.”
Todd recommends five steps to salvage troubled customer relationships:
- Ask open-ended questions to understand where the breakdown occurred.
- Ensure the client feels fully heard and understood.
- Follow up with a detailed email summarizing the conversation and ask if there is anything that may have been missed or misunderstood.
- Offer concessions or additional corrective services to remedy any issues.
- Take full ownership of any oversight or wrongdoing.
Relationships on the rocks can be smoothed over when service providers carefully attend to customers’ concerns. For example, McCary once had a longtime customer who started becoming upset with their care.
“We ended up doing special visits with our most tenured and expert pruner so that he could spend a special session pruning their fruit trees,” he says. “That went a long way to appeasing the client so that they felt like they are receiving huge value for the service.”
Sometimes, customers simply need patience and calm communication. When Zimmerman was doing a small repair for a customer and accidentally left an empty tube of glue in the flowerbed, “the man completely lost it and was screaming at me the next day when I returned,” he says. “He was shaking with rage. He had the tube of glue in his hand and was yelling.”
Zimmerman refused to match the customer’s anger and just waited for him to calm down.
“I gave him a genuine apology and asked how to solve the issue,” he says. “I genuinely wanted him to be happy. That flipped the switch on the situation and he became reasonable.”
Finally, showing a willingness to go above and beyond expectations to please customers can lead to strong, long-term relationships. For example, The Todd Group has worked for a family for many years across various properties. Before the team started a front yard renovation, the client expressed concerns about their 100+ heirloom roses and their desire to move the roses to their summer home in Nantucket.
“We assured them that we would handle it with care,” Todd says. “We carefully dug up each plant, created a custom potting mix, potted them, and bagged each pot. After two flights, there were still 15 roses that needed to be delivered. We drove for eight hours and took a ferry to ensure the remaining roses reached their destination. While this was a unique experience, it illustrates the lengths we go to for our clients.”
This article was published in the Sept/Oct issue of the magazine. To read more stories from The Edge magazine, click here to subscribe to the digital edition.
