Fair Expectations: Reducing the Severity of Pest Control Claims
By John Culotta
Despite the care you take in performing pest treatments, customers are still seeking damages when treatments do not go exactly as expected. No treatment approach is effective 100 percent of the time, so what else can you do to keep them happy? It might be something as basic as communicating clearly.
From your first conversation with a potential customer, you must be careful to manage their expectations. This communication approach is key for preventing and reducing the severity of your professional liability insurance claims.
Managing customer expectations may take several forms. For one, be sure to tell them more than one treatment may be necessary to eradicate a pest from their home—especially if that pest is bed bugs. You should also avoid granting too many guarantees, whether in contracts or conversations. You may also want to keep them involved in the process, which may involve including them on your initial walk through.
For more details on these processes, click through to the attached video, where I explain each of these approaches in more detail.
Communicating with your customers is an easy and relatively fool-proof way to keep them happy, no matter the outcome of a treatment.
John Culotta is Program Manager of PCOpro, the pest control operator program at Brownyard Group (www.brownyard.com), a leading administrator providing specialized insurance coverage for select industry groups. He can be reached at jculotta@brownyard.com or by calling 800-645-5820, ext. 122. |
