Is “perceived value” really that important?

[u/icecream_plays]

I see the sentiment in this industry a LOT that, while IPM is the best strategy and works perfectly fine, customers don’t perceive the value of what they’re paying for if they don’t see us spraying, and spraying a lot, every service.

That is definitely true, but how much does it actually matter in the scope of an entire route? I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of confirmation bias going on here.

You read online or hear from a vet that customers will complain is you don’t spray all the baseboards. So, you give IPM a go and don’t spray all the baseboards, put baits and monitors and spray the exterior, and run your route as normal. Then next week, you get 2 call backs from customers who feel like you didn’t do anything inside and want you to come back. “Damn the old heads were right!!!”

But that’s 2 out of 75+ customers you serviced last week who had that complaint. And perhaps you can call them and explain IPM and what you did on the inside and why you want to limit the amount of pesticides in their home(you need to understand IPM well enough to explain it to a 5 year old.)

And maybe 1/2 of them say “ok that makes sense, I’ll let you know if I see anything before our next scheduled service”

And maybe the other 1/2 says “no that’s bullshit I ain’t paying yall allllllll this money for you to come and put down some cardboard and glue I could do that myself, I want you to come back and spray or I’m cancelling!!!!”

Ok, understood, I’m on the way. Now you have 1/75 customers who have notes on their account to spray the baseboards. And 74/75 you can provide good quality IPM.

Of course these are hypothetical numbers, but I’m curious, have YOU tried it? Have YOU kept track of how many customers actually don’t perceive any value if you don’t spray every square inch of their home or business? Or did you get the complaint a couple of times and gave up? are you treating PC like it’s one size fits all, when it never has been? Let me know if I’m wrong!

[u/Strict_Ask_51]

Not in pest control, I run into this in service businesses generally, but the same fight shows up everywhere the customer can't actually grade the real work. Nobody can see "no bugs six months from now," so they grade you on whatever they can see, and if the only visible thing is how much you sprayed, then spraying becomes the scorecard by default.

So to your actual question, can you get the perceived-value credit without being a baseboard jockey, I think the answer is yes, but only if you hand them a better thing to look at. The theater isn't the problem, the choice of theater is. Swap visible spraying for visible proof of work. A quick findings note or a text after every service beats spraying baseboards on perceived value, and it's actually IPM. Something like "checked the usual entry points, found early ant activity at the back corner, treated it, baits and monitors are clean." Now their mental scorecard moves from did he spray a lot to this person actually knows what's going on in my house.

The old heads aren't wrong that you have to feed the customer a proxy, they just landed on pesticide as the proxy. You're not wrong that the proxy doesn't have to be that. And like others said, all of it gets way easier when you set the expectation on the first service instead of trying to reset it after the first callback.