questions are always answered if the customer survey is completed.” For a benchmarking survey, Sager says the questions shouldn’t change much so you can tell how you’re growing in certain areas. “People might think I need to change our survey every year to keep it fresh,” Sager says. “I would hesitate to do that because you want to have consistent answers to see how you’re tracking.” Currently, Chalet sends their bench- mark survey out in January/February, but Sager says he’d like to start sending it in September. “Ideally, you’re sending it out and you’re getting responses with enough time left in the season to make some changes before the renewal time comes,” Sager says. “That’s why we’re strategical- ly looking to shift that up, to give us time to act after we’ve gotten responses to the survey.”


PARTICIPATION AND INCENTIVES Grosh says they have less than 30 percent participation for their surveys. They don’t offer any participation incentives as they want the survey to be free of any influence. Sager says they offer gift certificates to their retail facility to get more people to respond to the design/build surveys but don’t have any incentives for the benchmarking client survey. “For the benchmarking survey, for the maintenance survey, it’s pretty low,” Sager says. “It’s about 20 percent. We’re working on ways to increase that. For the design/build ones, the ones we’re actually giving the gift certificate that’s closer to 30 percent.”


RESPONDING TO NEGATIVE SURVEYS Yet employee surveys do you no good if you collect customer feedback, but never act on what they have to say. If you ignore customer concerns for too long, it can even result in a lack of participation as it becomes clear nothing will change. If Chalet receives ratings on the one- and two-scale or if there’s a lot of nega- tive commentary this prompts immediate follow-up from Sager. “When they give us a really negative one, you can almost kind of feel if they’re just venting and having a bad day,” Sager says. “Regardless, we reach out and what we tend to find out is that if it is just a bad day, and they’re venting and they’re not really that upset about their service when I do reach out to follow up with


them, they don’t respond because they’ll realize they went too far. If they are being genuine, they usually have no issue getting right back to you.”


Grosh says they handle every negative issue immediately and correct the complaint. “We are going to make whatever issue the client has right so why not deal with it promptly,” Grosh says. “This conveys that we care about our clients and any issues they may have. With existing clients, we do not require any money upfront to begin the landscape project. We are paid after the landscape project is completed to our clients’ satisfaction, which leads to a better experience for our clients and no issues with a negative survey or a bad review.”


MAKING CHANGES


Grosh says they’re always open to how the customer thinks and perceives things. “We then look at how we can better implement the client’s request on a change if it leads to a better client experience,” Grosh says. “Some clients ask us to add additional services that are


not inside of what we do best but based on experience it is usually way outside of our service offerings and we believe that most people would not look to a landscaper for those types of projects.” Sager says they analyze the survey information as it comes in and look for trends. For example, if they had lot of complaints about their billing process Sager would discuss the issue with different department heads. “We’ve really looked hard at our billing process based on some of our surveys and made adjustments from that,” Sager says. Their survey touches on every department from billing to production and sales. They will break down the information by salesperson and go over with them what areas their clients are happy about and what areas they need to improve. “We’ve made simple changes like sometimes you can tell after reading a survey you know it’s probably time to change their representative,” Sager says. “There’s a relationship thing here. Personality issues will come out in that survey.” TLP


Chalet sends several different types of surveys to their customers to


gauge their satisfaction. Photo: Chalet


National Association of Landscape Professionals 21


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