I recently had an all-too-common frustrating experience with arborists not answering their phones or returning voicemail messages and emails. I needed to have a 60-foot white pine trimmed and topped before the hurricane season down here on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. This is not just an arborist issue. I’ve had similar experiences with all types of small businesses—including sign and screen printers—being really bad about answering emails and voicemails promptly. In fact, it’s such a commonly-acknowledged and widespread problem that when I raise it with other people, they mostly just shrug and laugh.
But it’s not a laughing matter if you’re a small business owner. It’s likely costing these enterprises a lot of lost customers.
But one arborist set an example for all small businesses everywhere. What he realizes is that customers are impatient. If they’re looking for a product or service and email or call about it, they want an answer right away. If you don’t make a point of responding to inquiries promptly (within minutes if possible, but certainly within a couple of hours) your competition is likely to get the business. This means that the money and time you spent on advertising to get the potential customer to contact you, would have been wasted. But the arborist in question here, responded to my voicemail in about three minutes. They came out the next day, quoted me on the spot, and did the job the next day after that. And better still, I gave them the contact information for two other people needing and arborist.
So, the takeaway? If you or an employee are not on the phone or computer responding to inquiries as they occur, commit to check regularly (every hour on the hour?) for email and voicemail inquiries and answer them, even it’s only to reassure the potential customer that you’ll be back with details shortly. Because word of mouth works both ways.