How to Achieve Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty

While gaining new customers is a big bonus for your portable sanitation business, keeping the customers you have is perhaps more important to long-term success. Therefore, it is vital that you build good relationships with existing clients, or they may seek out competitors.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are two ends of the same stick. Customer satisfaction means your customers are happy with your services. Customer loyalty is the bigger challenge. Ensuring a customer comes back to you again and again takes some work and time, but there are novel ways to achieve this.

Make Courtesy Your Trademark

Politeness, good manners, and a friendly disposition may seem like common knowledge to a business owner, yet we’ve all had customer service experiences where we’ve felt these traits were lacking.

Remember that a courteous attitude should run right through your company from top to bottom. Set the example yourself, treat both customers and staff with respect and dignity, and ensure that your drivers and other employees are doing the same. Anyone who meets a client in person or speaks with them over phone or via email is a representative of your business.

Cleanliness is Key

The importance of cleanliness in the portable restroom industry cannot be overstated. You can be courteous, punctual, and offer a good price, but if your units are not cleaned thoroughly, you can guarantee the customer will look elsewhere. Train your staff to the highest degree when it comes to cleaning, invest in the best products for cleaning units, and always have spare cleaning products in trucks and on-site.

Make Sure You Follow Up

Don’t just dump your units on a site and collect them afterwards, thinking your work is done. Communicate with your customers during and after the job and they’ll feel comforted that you’re on top of things and that you care.

Perform routine checks and maintenance. Call or email the customer after the units have been taken away to find out how satisfied they were with the service. Ask if they have any upcoming events or jobs for which they could use you again. If, for example, they say they may need you in a few months’ time, make a note to follow up closer to that time.

Act on Feedback

If you receive any feedback — negative or positive — make sure you really listen and consider implementing changes if necessary. Don’t just ignore what your customers are saying. There is real value in customer feedback that will not only help you improve your services for future clients but hold onto the ones you have.

Go the Extra Mile

Be a presence. If you’re an approachable business owner to whom clients feel they have a direct line, it makes the experience much more personal for them and results in customer satisfaction and loyalty. A handy insider tip is to find out your clients’ birthdays and call or email on the day.

Be consistent. Send the same drivers to the same jobs so relationships can develop. If you have more than one person handling customer service, tie clients to individual staff members so the client isn’t always speaking to someone new and a rapport can be built.

Building up trust takes time, but through consistency, reliability, cleanliness, and personal touches, your customers will form bonds with your company. No one likes the risk of change, especially not for their portable restroom needs — clients would rather find one reliable company they can call upon time and again. Put in a little extra work, and you’ll become the go-to guys for jobs well into the future.

Looking to Take Your Portable Restroom Business to the NEXT LEVEL? Download our FREE Guide: “Your Guide to Operating A Portable Restroom Business.”

Thinking About GETTING INTO the Portable Restroom Industry? Download our FREE Guide: “Your Guide to Starting A Portable Restroom Business.”