Neat and tidy

Good customer service isn’t just growing a green lawn or finishing a job on time and on budget. Leaving a clean site is the finishing touch and a great way to show your customers you care about them and their properties.

Green Lawn Fertilizing in West Chester, Pennsylvania, offers lawn care services including granular fertilizer, which can spill over onto driveways, sidewalks and decks. So crews are all equipped with leaf blowers, extendable brooms and dustpans to move any spillover back onto lawns.

“At the end of the job, they’re to go and blow all of the areas and get everything back onto the grass and off of the street and those non-target areas,” says Chris DeJohn, operations manager. “It’s part of the application so we hold a really high standard when it comes to cleanup.”

DeJohn says there aren’t many issues with cleaning up after liquid applications but trucks carry gallons of clean water and brooms just in case there’s a spill. Every truck also has a spill kit with snakes, absorbent pillows and personal protective equipment.

However, spills don’t happen often since the company keeps very small amounts of undiluted product on the truck and mixes it with a tank of fresh water as needed.

“That’s more of an environmentally safe approach, we feel – having just the fresh water on the truck. Then if anything were to happen to the tank or whatever, it’s just fresh water coming out of it. It’s not a mixed product like some of the other companies have.”

Keep clean on your crew’s minds.

Before technicians even start work with Green Lawn Fertilizing, they learn the importance of leaving a clean site. The company handbook, where all employees start, has a thorough section on cleanup. Then, for the first week out in the field, new hires are responsible for blowing off sites after more veteran technicians have completed service.

“Their first week is just basically drilled in about blowing everything off and making sure that everything is clean because that’s all they’re really doing at that point,” DeJohn says.

Technicians have to know how to clean carefully, making sure that they aren’t blowing debris around pedestrians or inhaling dust and dirt.

Green Lawn Fertilizing’s management has weekly meetings with all of its technicians and so if the company has received any complaints, managers will be sure to go over the importance of cleanup. But that only happens one to three times a month out of 500 stops per day, DeJohn says.

“We also get one or three a month who will call in and say ‘They guy even blew everything off’ like that’s a new concept to them that they haven’t seen before.”