Webinar: How to Retain Your Customers in the Digital Age

Full Webcast Transcript Below 

Sheri: Hello, everybody. I'm Sheri Spencer Bachman. We're going to go ahead and get started since it is four o'clock and we value your time.  

I'm Sheri Spencer Bachman, the pest control business coach. Today I am excited to be bringing Gary Burch with Cinch marketing here to join us. 

He's an account executive with Cinch. What I really love about his product is it does help us as PCOS to focus on cross-selling existing customers, winning back cancelled customers, getting customer referrals, getting customer reviews, as well as retaining and increasing the value of each customer that we have, which is something all of us wants to do. 

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Before we get started and Gary takes over and tells us a little bit more about himself, if everybody can look at the top right of your screen where it has the View in Zoom. Make sure that you have it on Speaker View and then also make sure you've muted so that we don't have any background noise in there. I am going to mute some that haven't. 

Gary, why don't you tell us more about yourself and go from there. 

Gary: Awesome, thank you, Sheri. First of all, thank you to Sheri for the great partnership. She's awesome to work with. We had an opportunity to—we had spoken a little bit but finally got to meet her out in Oklahoma City about a month ago. She has so much knowledge and experience. I appreciate the opportunity to do this co-branded webinar with you. Thanks again. 

Sheri: Thank you. 

Gary: Like she mentioned, my name is Gary Burch with Cinch. To give you a little bit of background, I started with Cinch in March of this year, 2023. Prior to that, I worked at Briostack Software. Some of you may be familiar with that. They are a software similar to FieldRoutes or PestPac, one of the competitors there.  

Most recently I was the director of sales. I worked at Briostack for two years. I have a passion for the pest control industry and understanding the people going to multiple events. I'm sure you've seen Briostack, Academy, PestWorld.  

I learned a lot about pest control and even more so the value of the data that is within your database. There's so much opportunity there and low hanging fruit that simply is not being taken advantage of from a from a company perspective and giving you more opportunities.  

When I had the opportunity to come over to Cinch it was it was kind of a no-brain for me. As I learned about Cinch, which started in the automotive space in oil and lube so your quick lubes like Grease Monkey and Jiffy Lube we have some big contracts with them, the value there was to help companies get customers back in their garages. 

When we compared that to pest control, we had some strong influence on the vendor side when it came to pest control and there was so much opportunity we saw there. Then they brought me over to really dive into pest control with my experience.  

That's why I'm here, that's what we're working from, and that's just kind of a background on me overall. 

Sheri: All right, Gary, as you get started, I have a question for you. I am going to be monitoring chat, so if y'all have any questions please throw them in the chat. Do you want those read out to you or should people raise their hands if they have questions throughout the presentation or at the end? How do you want that handled? 

Gary: I like interactive webinars, so let's bring them on. If by chance I'm going to have the answer upcoming in a slide or two, then I may push a question off or just say, hey, that's upcoming. Then if we have to table some for the end, we'll do that. But let's have them bring them on, let's fire away. 

Sheri: If you have any questions, throw them in the chat. I will get Gary started, or raise your hand and we will get you unmuted so that you can ask your question. 

Gary: We're going to dive into it here. What I want to talk about today is how to recover, retain, and enhance your customers in the digital age. If you look at it, in 2019 that was the first year that millennials gained buying power over the baby boomer generation.  

What that means is a bigger focus on technology overall. If you remember before that if somebody has a negative experience with the company, they're going to go tell ten people. Whereas if they have a positive experience, they're going to tell three people. 

It's kind of switched because the millennials are more likely to share positive experiences and more likely to recommend services or products than the generation before them. And the thing to keep in mind is that in pest control, three and a half billion dollars switches hands every single year in pest control.  

Are you on the receiving end of that? Or are you losing that business to other companies? I like this quote to just kind of put this at top of mind, your buyers today are much more likely to write an online review or a post about their experience.  

That's where it all begins. What are you doing to take care of your customers? What is your company's vision? What is your reputation online?  

When you think of characteristics of success for pest control companies. I know Sheri's an expert on this and seeing companies that are continuing to grow and companies that maybe stay stagnant. Key features of the fastest growing pest control companies include a customer centric approach, innovative marketing and sales, operational efficiency and technology use, and then adaptive adaptability and resilience. 

I want to highlight some of the factors here so when you look at the customer-centric approach first and foremost comes exceptional service. I see companies out there going above and beyond to make sure their experience is the best it possibly can be. A piece of this that I noticed and that I've really seen that has made an impact is setting clear expectations.  

What kind of expectations you set even before you go out to that appointment because we all know in pest control you can spray, stir up things a little bit, and bugs are running around an hour or two after the appointment. Then customers go on and leave a Google review or they will reach out to you and complain about it and want to reservice right away. 

If we set the expectations ahead of time that it takes some time with pesticide to do its job, then that sets clear expectations and they're less likely to have that knee-jerk reaction after the appointment. So that's an example of setting clear expectations and then following up and making sure we provide the best service possible.  

In innovative marketing and sales, the data driven approach. This is something that is more important in this digital age. Do you understand the data that you have? Are you utilizing that data effectively? Another way to utilize that data is with a multi-channel marketing approach. 

How many customers want you to call them? How many respond well to email? What's the engagement like from a texting perspective? It's important to understand that not all your customers engage with you the same way. Focusing on the best way for each of them is the most effective approach.  

When it comes to operations and efficiency, again, understanding the data. That requires some technology, some analytics, and some investment in technology overall. That  will help us to be adaptable and be resilient through the process. 

Sheri, I wanted to ask. You work with a lot of companies, what do you see as companies that tend to make the leap when it comes to growth and continued success as opposed to ones that maybe just stay a little bit stagnant? 

Sheri: The ones that are growing are the ones that are looking to the future and changing based on where they want to go. Initially those companies that are smaller might be the girl in the office selling over the phone. Or they might be expecting technicians to sell.  

They're not tapping into their existing customer base for leads whatsoever. They're not going back and tapping into those people who used to be customers that left for one reason or another to see if they could win them back. They're not reselling one-time services that were previously sold. They're not doing things different. As you grow or you want to grow you can't keep doing the same things the same way and expect a different result. You've got to do some different things in order to make some new things happen. 

Gary: Perfect. I love what you said there because that's such a great point. A lot of companies have good intentions. They have intentions on reaching out to their past customer base or trying to cross sell during the summer mosquito service.  

But the problem is that when you don't have a system or a process in place, everybody gets busy. In pest control, everybody gets so busy during the summer that those things fall off. So you may send off one great email to your customers or a targeted group and then it falls off after the fact right. Then we lose out on that and all the momentum is gone. There's got to be a process behind it.  

Sheri mentioned this in that comment: customer retention. Every company I talk to they say, hey we want new customers, we want new business. And I totally get it. We all want new business. It doesn't matter if you're getting new customers though, if you can't keep the ones you have or you're not getting the true value out of those customers.  

We firmly believe here at Cinch that it all starts with your customer retention. That does equal growth. Think about it from cost of acquisition.  

It costs seven times less to retain a customer versus acquiring a new one. You have about a 50% higher close rate on additional services or higher packages with your existing customers as opposed to first-time customers. And last but not least, everybody's heard this the 80/20 rule, typically 20% of your customers your top 20% will bring in about 80% of your revenue.  

I call those your five-star customers. Those are your best customers. We want to understand them, what makes them valuable, and how can we target additional customers just like them to get more five-star customers.  

Sheri: The more a customer spends with you the less likely they are to leave because they have to find another company that does all the same services that you do. So they're spending more with you because they trust you and they they're loyal to you. You're retaining those customers longer if you're selling them more than one service. 

Gary: Love it! They're more invested in you and your company. They trust you and for that reason they're willing to give you multiple options. 

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It's kind of funny, this is a little bit of a tangent, but before my pest control career in software. I actually worked in wireless for a long time between Verizon and T-Mobile in positions where I was covering multiple stores and territories.  

It was really interesting because if you remember back in the day with cell phones, a lot of companies would have the free phone deals. We found as I'm analyzing my stores that when we gave away free phones with a plan, compared to when the customer had to purchase the phone and invest some money, the churn on the customers that got free phones was much higher than those that invested a lot upfront in the device and in accessories and other products along with it. 

To Sheri's point, when they're more invested in you from a product perspective and a service perspective, they're more likely to stay with you. I firmly believe in that and that's the importance of making sure that you're offering services to all your customers. If you have bundle packages, we're trying to get to those higher bundle packages. 

When I go to events and I talk to companies or I'm doing a demo for a specific company, I always like to ask you to evaluate your company. Think about this. Recently when I was with Sheri out in Oklahoma City, I'll have everybody raise their hand: Hey, think to yourself who does a great job of retaining your customers, cross-selling to your existing customers, and winning back past customers? 

Typically when I ask this question nobody raises their hand. The fact is because it can be a little bit overwhelming and time consuming. If you think to yourself, hey, how well do I do at these things? Be honest with yourself.  

With your company, do you have an efficient process for winning back customers, educating current customers, cross selling or upselling existing customers, promoting Google reviews, and then leveraging those Google reviews, those five-star customers, to get referrals from those customers—which is an interesting concept. 

Sheri and I were talking a little bit about this. Sheri, what were your thoughts on the companies that do a good job of this? Does anybody do a good job of this in your mind? 

Sheri: I think that we all have good intentions to do a good job of this and then the phones start ringing or something like that happens. I think that winning back past customers, educating current customers, no. They might focus on that every now and then. But it's not consistent. There's not a consistent system that does it for them. And then when they get busy, even if there is a system for it, sometimes that system gets put on the back burner. 

Cross selling and upselling existing customers, yeah when we're slow we are potentially working it. I found my guys might work the same two pages of the list and never get to the rest of the 180 pages of the list to those other customers and were they consistent unless somebody was monitoring who they were calling and how often they were calling and what was being done. 

There had to be a real system in place. A lot of us do good job at Google reviews. That's usually the Number One way most companies are getting leads, but what are we doing with those to get referrals other than maybe posting those Google reviews on our website and stuff? There's a lot more that could definitely be done.  

Gary: Yes. Three things really stick out when you spoke. One is process. Do you have a process for this? Number two is consistency. Is it happening regularly or does it just kind of fall off? And three is follow-up. 

To your point, if you have somebody in charge of this or you do have a system that can help with this process, you have somebody who's managing it and making sure that it's working properly. That’s the challenge with it. If you're trying to do this manually, it's just not sustainable.

That's what we're looking to do. The companies that grow effectively put in sustainable processes that can continue forward. If you have to make changes to it, you can make changes to it.  

I want to talk about retention. First of all, we want to provide value. If you want to retain your customer, there has to be ongoing value. Not just in the beginning, of course. Getting an exceptional experience is super important, but what happens from there? Are you communicating clearly? Are you going the extra mile?  

Then it comes to building brand trust and loyalty. Do you run loyalty programs? Do you run contests or incentives for your customer? Or is it a lot of focus and energy up front and then after that we kind of forget about you until your next service comes about? Do we offer education? 

I know this this is a big thing. I've talked to Mandy Berkowitz (with The Image Marketing Group), who's actually on the call right now too, we talked about this a lot. The importance of reaching out to your customers and offering value to them without necessarily asking for money.  

Every one of our communications should not be hey come get this new service, or hey, upgrade to this package, but let's offer some proactive education of how to prevent mosquitoes during the summer, how can you prevent ants, and another pest problem. Being proactive with that helps those customers to know that you care and you genuinely want them to have a pest-free home.  

Then encouraging feedback so the ability to send out surveys, to send out Google reviews. Not only that, but, like Sheri and I talked about, just being able to leverage those reviews to help you understand more or get more customers just like them.  

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Last but not least, to retain your customers. It is very important to have some sort of automated reminders, automated appointment reminders, automated billing reminders, just giving an option for your customers to stay engaged with you. 

Digital communication is huge. Having your customers get in front of your social media posts, get in front of your Google ads, being able to receive some messages from you through email or text message, whatever works best for them.  

That's a strong way to retain your customers by simply touching base with them. Not so much in a way that you're always trying to collect from them. 

Next would be to recover your customers. You have past customers and studies show if a customer has a relationship with your company they are much more likely to come back to you than go back to a company that they know nothing about. 

I always talk about this pest control is out of sight out of mind. You guys are the greatest heroes when you solve a pest problem. But when somebody doesn't have a pest problem, they don't really think about pest control. 

Is that fair to say, Sheri? 

Sheri: Very true.  

Gary: Unsung heroes I call it because the job that you guys do is so important from a sanitation perspective from a safety perspective.  

Your customers probably haven't been with you recently or haven't had an appointment recently. Not because they don't like you. Not because they didn't have a great experience. But because they didn't see the need, or they forgot, or maybe they moved. Something along those lines. 

It's important for you to remind them that you're still there. There's a balance. Some companies, and I hear this all the time, well, we don't want to bombard our customers. We don't want to overcommunicate with them. 

Which I completely agree. But you also don’t want to under-communicate with them. You want to keep yourselves in front of them. That can be through a Christmas email from your team, wishing them a Merry Christmas. 

It could be offering a promotion just to come back and, hey, let's protect you from mosquitoes during the summer. It's you being able to get in front of your customers and they are more likely to choose you than they would a brand new company. 

Number Two: give them reasons to come back. Give them proactive pest prevention tips, offer a free inspection or discounts. But you have to put in the work and the effort to be able to do this and to get them back. 

Last but not least, it's too hard to do this all on your own manually. You have to leverage technology. You have to leverage that manual communication. You have to have dynamic, targeted lists that you can utilize to get to the specific people that you do want to target. And then, of course, that multi-channel approach with how they best interact with you. 

Sheri, have you seen with specific companies or with your own companies best practices for recovering customers or getting them back with you? 

Sheri: I’ve always found this to be a little bit harder. But it's work. You've got to work at it. And there wasn't the technology to help with the recovery. I think that having technology do anything that's repeatable like this it definitely helps. Making these phone calls, trying to get to these customers, but it's been done. I've had customers leave and go with another company, and you've kind of reminded them how great you are and that you really wanted their business because you reached out and asked for it or touched to say how's it going, hope you're hope you're happy with who you left with, or your financial problems fixed, or whatever.  

I mean obviously if people moved out of your territory, you're not going to recover them. Understanding why people leave is good and if we handled them leaving well and showed empathy when they cancelled, we have a good chance of that recovery process. Just like following up on a sale.  

Gary: That's a great point. It's not everybody's going to stay with you. You will have some customer churn. How do you handle that? Do you burn the bridge as they're on their way out? Or do you always keep the door open? 

I think that's where that open feedback is important in the form of surveys or responding quickly to Google reviews and just being there to support your customers no matter what.  

I also hear a lot, well, we want to keep a personal approach, we want to keep a personal touch with our customers. Which I agree is important. But it's also hard when you're scaling your business to have a personal call with every single one for every single appointment reminder. Things like that.  

There are ways to utilize technology. With how technology is today to personalize messaging to each customer with unique data points that you have already within your software system to make it an easier and more efficient process but also still keep that personal touch with them. 

Sheri: I also think you have to think about who is our customer today. Millennials don't like to talk on the phone. If it's the millennials that's our customer and they're the ones leaving, why are we trying to call them? They're not going to answer.  

We need to reach out to them in other forms and the easiest way to do that is through technology versus us manually reaching out through text, or through email, or through some other form of communication. They don't want to talk. 

Gary: I love that. To your point, that's the importance of a multi-channel approach. Some customers check their email all the time. Me, I am not great at checking my personal email so I'm probably not going to engage with that message you send through there. But if you send me a text, as a millennial, you can bet that I'm going to open that and possibly respond to it. As opposed to I don't like to pick up the phone normally. Unless I'm working. I don't really want to pick up the phone and talk to anybody. I know a lot of people can relate to that.  

A lot of times when I'm talking to pest control companies. is it how your customers want things done or want to be communicated with? Or is it what you're used to doing from a communication perspective? If you're used to calling your customers all the time, how do you know that they don't prefer something different? 

Are you requesting that feedback? Are you trying to understand how they best interact with you? That's part of enhancing your customer base and creating these five-star customers.  

You need to understand what is your ICP and this is the value of you knowing your customers and your demographic. What are their characteristics? What services do the best customers have? How many services? Or what, if you do bundle package, is what package are they on—the ones that stick the most. 

Understanding then how you can target more customers like these. Offering bundle packages is a great way to get more value, like Sheri said earlier. If they have more investment with you, they're more likely to be loyal to you and to your company. 

Do they know about all of the services that you offer? I use this example because it's kind of funny to me. Talking to a pest control company, they had a customer that was like, oh yeah, I need to call Mosquito Joe or Mosquito Authority to come take care of my mosquitoes. Not realizing that that pest control company also offered a mosquito service. And most do! But they don’t know unless you bring it up. 

Sheri: My company name was Spencer Pest Services. I had customers tell me they didn't know we did pest control. They were termite customers that didn't know we did pest control, and it was in our name. So people don't know the services that you’re doing. That you do mosquito. They think they have to call a mosquito company no, offense to any mosquito companies on the call, or that they got to call somebody else to do termite work. Or they got to call somebody else to do rodent work, or moisture work, or some of the other services that so many of us offer. They don't realize it unless we're constantly letting them know what it is that we do.  

Gary: That's such a such a great point because before I started in pest control, I would have had no idea. If you don't see termite in the name, or mosquito in the name, then a lot of times people are like, oh well, they don't do it. I need to go find somebody with that in their name.  

That's the importance of letting your customers know on a regular basis all the services that you offer. The average customer is not going to understand that. 

I think when you've worked in pest control for a while, you kind of think in your mind, well yeah, if I'm a pest control company I'm going to pretty much cover it all. But the average person doesn't know that or understand that.  

That's where it's really important to have those conversations and have those communications with your customers. 

Another thing that I saw, and I saw this with Briostack, and I talked about this a lot: promoting subscription services. That helps you create consistent scheduling, allows flexibility when you're adding new customers on, it protects your topline revenue, reduces attrition, reduces appointment cancellations.  

We all know if you're doing a quarterly service and that customer ends up cancelling one of those services, you're out one quarter of the of the revenue on that quarterly service for the year. So if you can get them on a subscription service, where you come out no matter what. And they're paying on a monthly basis spreading that cost over 12 months as opposed to four different appointments or however you do it if you do a tri-service three times a year. 

That's a great way to keep customers engaged with you and keep them coming back and not having scratched or canceled appointments.  

Reviews and referrals, referrals, referrals. I love referrals. I think you can do studies in any industry, those tend to be the best customers is when you have your five-star customers bring in more five-star customers.  

It's such a huge opportunity when we talk about reviews, Google reviews and whatnot, we can send out the Google—at Cinch—we can send out Google review communication to request a review.  

There are so many services out there that can do that. You can send out the Google review link. I'm more concerned with what you do with that. Can you bring that data in? When you get that five-star referral, can you link it back to a transaction in your CRM? And then automatically request a referral from that customer? 

I think so many companies are missing out on that opportunity there. When I'm talking to companies about Cinch that's something that really resonates with them is being able to not only get great five-star reviews, which helps you in the long run, helps you get more customers and new business, but it can also help you get organic new business through your great customers already. 

I want to talk a little bit here about Cinch and how we can factor into all this. Like I mentioned, I have that experience and that knowledge in the pest control software and understanding what is within your database. 

Now, whenever I do these I want to be careful to not come across as too salesy and too like hey, this is all a setup to push the product.  

What I want you to understand is that there's so much value here in what we just talked about, in enhancing your customer base, and giving you more opportunities moving forward. 

This is how Cinch can help with that process. Basically, what Cinch does is we integrate with your database, whether that's a FieldRoutes, Briostack, PestPac. We pull in that data so we can see what's in the technician app, what's being done through there, the office side. We pull in that data and then we can clean and match that data. 

What that means is we're able to go in and if you had a duplicate customer in your software, we can consolidate that to one view within Cinch from a marketing perspective. Then we can look at the value of your customers too. We can group them together from one to five.  

One are your very best customers. They're the most frequent, the most recent, and they end up spending the most. Then that could be down to the five. The number five, which is that one-time customer from four years ago. 

We can put them in different groups. Then as it comes in here, all that data you can utilize the data to segment customers by any group of data points that you have within your system.  

Then from there, we can put these customers through automated communication like Sheri and I have been talking about in the way that they best interact with you. Do they respond best to emails? Do they respond best to text messages? What about direct mail? Are there some opportunities there with direct mail? Can we push them into your Google ads or your Facebook ad audiences? 

This gives us the ability to communicate with them. Then once we go through that communication, then we can see do they get back on this schedule? Do they add that additional service? Do they take the Google review?  

Then we're going through again and we call this our infinity loop because we're going through, we're analyzing, we're taking action, we're adjusting our approach, and we move forward. This is a way to automate it based upon the data that's already in your database. 

So what do we focus on? We focus on a multi-channel approach. We want to hit your customers in every way. We've talked about this a lot already. Giving you the ability to communicate with them in multiple ways and having interaction, calls to action, access to lead forms, and landing pages to be able to help you out.  

Was there a question there? 

Sheri: Can you explain the enriched data part of your infinity loop? 

Gary: Great question, so this portion of it's not an automatic thing that happens as part of the integration. But let's say, for example, you wanted to get a list. So you get a list of customers, and this could be like a pre-treat list, or something along those lines, or a new move in lists. 

What you can do then is we can help run it through an external data source to enrich that and provide a little bit more information. Maybe you have an email but you're wanting to get a phone number as well or vice versa.  

It's basically just giving you additional data over what you have originally. 

Sheri: Is this like if you got a Sales Genie list or something like that where you were pulling in new homeowners or something like that. You would then enrich that, pull in the extra data for it so that you could then text and email and all that stuff. 

Gary: Correct, yep. Thank you, great question. 

The multi-channel approach, so why do we take the multi-channel approach? I love what Sheri said earlier: millennials do not want to talk on the phone. When you look at the different forms of communication, what's interesting, and I like to start here, is phone calls.  

And this may have changed because this was a few months ago, but the actual phone app was the fifth most used app on a cell phone. So we're talking everybody uses other apps besides the phone to make phone calls. 

76% of consumers report they don't like talking to businesses on the phone. So to that point earlier, people would prefer other forms of communication. There's where text messaging comes in. It's the most common form of communication for millennials. 

68% of millennials admitted to texting a lot daily, which averages to be 2,981 text messages per month and higher. If you have teenage kids, I promise you that is way higher. You guys already know because I have two teenagers and that text number is astronomical. I hear their phone constantly going off and it actually drives me crazy.  

But the fact is that texting has a 98% open rate and a 45% response rate. You compare that to email, which on average is around 20 to 21% open rate with about a 6% response rate.

Email is low engagement but also it is cost effective. So there is still a place for email as there's a place for text messaging. But it's all part of a process and a strategic one at that. 

And then Facebook and Google ads. This is kind of the new way. There's the direct form of communication, but there's the indirect form of communication. You can get in front of your customers, when we're talking about out of sight out of mind. How do we keep you in front of your customers? How do we keep them engaged without you having to bombard them with text messages and emails? It's utilizing Facebook and Google ads. 

Google ads tend to focus more on high visibility and sales specifically. Social media can also be sales and it is, but engagement and brand building. Being open and being willing to have open conversation through social media, people appreciate that these days.  

Instead of continuing to bombard your customers with direct communication, let's strategically, and this is something you can do with Cinch we can manage the Google and Facebook ad audiences. If you've tried communicating through email and text and this particular customer isn't responding, you can then push them into your Google ads to see that mosquito service you have going or to see that most recent social media ad or post that you have. We're strategically putting them in front of you, again, without us having our hands out and asking for more from those customers. 

Sheri: All right we have a question, Gary from David. “What guidance do you have on the optimal mix of sales outreach versus other outreach. For example, how do you not overload your customers when, especially in the spring, you have a lot of services to sell them? Example: monthly educational emails, then two emails per month of sales emails. What is the good blend between educational and selling? 

Gary: That's a great question. I'll have you also answer that Sheri because I'm sure you have a lot of experience with that with that.  

The value and the focus here is sometimes companies have the idea of let's blast this promotion to all of our customers. I think that's where the ability with Cinch to help you get a little bit more targeted helps.  

I think it's okay to reach out to customers in an effort to upsell or cross sell. But the specific type of customer—what I mean by that is, let's say we have some general pest customers and we want to target them for termites during the spring.  

My advice would be to dive into the details of that customer. Let’s say, hey, a general pest customer who hasn't had a termite service ever, but they've been with us for at least a year. 

They've never had termites, but they've been a customer for at least a year. Let's really kind of be a little bit more assertive with them when it comes to pushing a service because they've been consistent with you, they've had multiple services, they have a history with you as opposed to a customer that maybe has been on board for three months. Then we're going to just continue to bombard them asking for more money.  

So the exact number of communication educational compared to sales maybe, Sheri, you have some ideas on that, but I would just say having a good mix of them. And then, when it is that time, spring, that's a time where you really want to focus on selling and cross selling and getting more opportunity. 

Maybe later in the year, toward the end of the fall, it's education on what to do through the winter to protect yourselves so that you don't have a huge pest problem in the spring.  

That's some initial thoughts. Sheri, what do you have to add to that? 

Sheri: I agree. I think there has to be a mix. I think if you educate your customers on termites for instance. And the damage termites cause, and what that cost looks like, and aggravation looks like type of deal from an educational standpoint, and when they swarm, and all the different things around that, and then offer a special to get termite prevention. Especially if you're offering a baiting system, which is easier to sell from a preventive standpoint in my opinion. 

Then you know you're now not just bombarding them with sales. From a sales perspective I also think the timing is everything. People need to see things they say at least seven times and, yes, that creates a lot of noise. But if it hits my desk, or my phone in a text or an email or whatever. And I'm busy. That's not on my radar right now. Or maybe it is and I need to do it but I forgot about it, and it comes up again at some point. It could trigger that response. I think people need to hear it more than once because there is so much noise out there that we can get lost in the noise as well. 

Gary: I love that and what I’ve seen is that, to your point, we have to have multiple touchpoints. What I have found is if you enter with, first, let's just say we're talking about those spring services. We go in right now, even though maybe they haven't thought much about it. But you come in right now with that educational piece of, hey, it's winter. Understand spring is coming quick. Are you protected against termites? And have a checklist of things to do. 

Then to Sheri's point, being able to say, here's the risk if you don't have these things protected. The first message, when I've seen a lot of success, the first message is purely educational.  

Then given the type of communication, with something like Cinch, you have the ability to send an email that's educational. And they'll have a link to click on. It could include an educational video or something along those lines. If they don't click on that, then we could send them a text message with similar messaging. 

But it's educational. So the first touchpoints could be solely educational and then on that third touchpoint we start incorporating, hey, if you have any questions or you're confused at all, book a free inspection with us and we'll come take a look at things for you. Or add on a slight discount of, hey, free inspection plus an opportunity to earn 10% off your full baiting system.  

You're slowly working to that with multiple touchpoints and then you're getting a little bit more aggressive with that leading up to the important time where there's a little bit more urgency in early spring. 

Sheri: Did that answer your question, David? 

Gary: Great question, thank you. 

So speaking a little bit more about that is the targeted customer segments. This is one thing that kind of blew me away when I started at Cinch to be honest with you. What we're doing when we're pulling over the data from your FieldRoutes, PestPac, Briostack. We can segment and group the data by any kind of data point that you have within FieldRoutes whether it's lead active, inactive, zip codes, service category. It could be if they've taken a Google review, and we've been able to pull that data in from FieldRoutes or your CRM and then we pull it in from Google My Business and we can match that to a specific customer. 

Then we can understand, okay, this customer did leave us a review. You'll see this in the customer history within Cinch too, you can see a history of their engagement with you and their communication if they've left you a Google review.  

So when we're building a segment, we're saying, hey, we want this specific zip code. I want (this would be what would be considered a win back segment) hey, I want in this zip code, I want any customers that have left us a five- or a four-star review within the last 18 months. We're doing a transaction within the last 18 months, and that they are in the Number One value category, so they're in the highest value category. We're saying these were highly valuable customers in the past, we want to get them back on board with us. Let's target them specifically. 

That's just an example of how granular you can get with those that you're targeting from a messaging and marketing perspective. 

That's one way, again. We're pulling the data, we're segmenting it, and then what we do is we can enter these customers and those segments in specific targeted groups in automated communication.  

If you see, this would be an example of okay, hey, we're predicting based upon the history and based upon the schedule these customers will come due for a service in the next 30 days. 

The system will pull that in based upon the data within your software system. Then we can say, okay, well we want to send them an email and then we want to wait a month and then check. We want to remind them that their service is upcoming. This could be used for a termite annual renewal reminder. This could be used for an upcoming appointment. This could be ahead of time if they have a service coming up and you want to talk to them about mosquitoes or rodents during the fall.  

We're going to send them a communication, continue this through, wait a month and then we're going to check and see if they jumped on board with you or they actually had a service, which if they did then we end the journey here. Or we continue it on and send them another email to try to get them back on service with you. 

We have the ability within Cinch and this is a very simple example to go in and create as if it's a blank canvas customer journeys to allow you to communicate with customers and pivot your approach based upon their interaction with that overall. 

That's where it comes in where the power of automation and leveraging technology happens. When you try to do this, if you have a manual process in place, you're trying to reach out with customers. You don't get much engagement and then it kind of dies from there. 

We can keep them going through this process and automate that. Then when people meet the criteria, they will be pulled out of it. So it's not like a text or email blast or broadcast where you send it to everybody. It's only communicating with the people that it applies to based upon how it's set up ahead of time. 

Here we talk about the weight of customer reviews. I think everybody knows the importance of that. Everybody checks online reviews not 90% check online reviews before going with a company. There's a direct correlation to an increase in a company's revenue with their increase in stars on Google.  

Then last but not least, this is what I hear often. There's the idea out there that you have to send a survey first and then if it's a good survey, four or five stars, then you request a Google review. 

What I learned here at Cinch, and I've seen across multiple industries, that it is best to go directly to the Google review. Send out those Google review links, increase the volume. Chances are you're going to get great reviews. There is a chance that you get a negative review. The reality is if you get a negative review, one, they were going to do it anyway. 

Even if they didn't take that internal survey, people who have a negative view are more likely to go straight to Google. Now if you allow them to, then you can go solve the problem. Up to 30%, so about a third of reviews, are reversed negative reviews. They are reversed if you have a prompt response and you reach out to the customer and take care of their problem. Not only that, but you'll get more reviews. It kind of drowns out those negative reviews. Don't be afraid to go straight to the Google review. There is a time and place for internal surveys and net promoter scores. But don't be afraid to go straight to the source. 

That's something Cinch can help with. Like I've talked about, let's send out that Google review link through email, through text message. We can send multiple automated follow-ups. Instead of just sending it once and then hoping they take it, and then waiting till the next service to ask them one time again for an email link to leave a Google review. 

Let's do follow-up with that and then when we get that five-star review in, let's automatically request a referral from that customer.  

Sheri: I think that's a huge point. I know that when we were trying to run our Google reviews through our CRM software, it always was a two-step process.  

Fewer customers actually did the reviews. When we started going direct to Google with the reviews, the amount of reviews definitely increased.  

Occasionally you're going to get that bad review because you had a technician mess up or something happened. But I 100% agree it's how quickly you respond to it, how you respond to it.  

Some of the bad reviews when people read them they go, well, yeah, that person doesn’t know what they're talking about, or wasn't very kind, or has unrealistic expectations, or something like that. 

If you got a bunch of bad reviews, you might want to look at your customer service. But an occasional bad review is not going to hurt you whatsoever. It's how you handle it. 

Gary: Absolutely. I use this example too. When I'm traveling the country with Cinch to different pest shows. I always Google restaurants or whatever it may be, things to do. When I look at companies you may have some companies that have a five-star rating. But then they have 10 reviews compared to one that may be 4.7 stars and they have 2,000 reviews. Well, guess where I'm going to go for dinner? I'm going to go to the one that has 2,000 reviews.  

You want quantity and you want quality. You want a high number of reviews and then you want a high star rating. But guess what? Consumers understand that there are those people out there that are never happy no matter what. No matter how great you are, they're going to complain about something. People are smart enough to realize that.  

We want to get a bigger sample size. I actually didn't even know this till I worked at Cinch, that technically it's what's called review gating when you do a survey and then do the Google review. Google does not like that. They frown upon that. Open it up. Don't be afraid of it, to Sheri's point. 

Maybe it gives you insight on your company. If you are getting more negative reviews, there's some things that you can improve on. Maybe setting better expectations, maybe adjusting the way your technicians do things, maybe adding a personal touch or a surprise or a prize, a surprise for your customers.  

Taking a look at that will absolutely help. But also having a way to easily respond to reviews. At Cinch, we can bring all the reviews in you have them in a list. You can see if you've responded to them or you haven't. You can actually set up automated journeys to automatically respond to those Google reviews. You can have up to 50 templated responses. When somebody leaves a review then the system will automatic kick out that response to it. So you can be on top of it. You don't have to spend all day responding to those Google reviews. 

Sheri: Gary, we're running close to being out of time. We wanted to make sure if we had no additional questions. I know a couple people had to leave, but they said it was very informational. You have a anybody out there? And if not, you want to be able to do a quick wrap up so we value everybody's time? 

Gary: Absolutely. If there are any questions, this is the last real slide here. This is what we've seen as the impact of Cinch. If you utilize it to its full capacity, these are things that we can help you with. 

We've talked a lot about these: increase in customer attention, help you with fewer canceled appointments, or helping you get canceled appointments back on the schedule, increase in revenue, increase in online reviews, help you reactivate lost customers, send out educational automated messaging ahead of their appointment, and then reduced employee time is huge. 

Let's save you guys time. Let's help you to be more efficient and effective overall. That's by leveraging technology while still keeping that personal touch and approach. 

That's what we have, unless there's any questions. I’m more than happy to answer questions. 

Sheri: Thank you so much for taking your time to join us today. We appreciate you being here. You will get a recording of the call, it will come out to your email probably in the morning. All of you who signed up to attend will get them via email. 

If you have any questions feel free to reach out to Gary or myself individually. We'll be happy to help. 

Gary: Absolutely, thank you, everyone. I really appreciate you jumping on. And I’m happy to help in any way possible.