Running a landscaping business today can be a high-wire act.  With the economy looking grim, the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warning of an economic “contraction” over the next several months and new housing starts in the toilet compared to last year (which wasn’t a great year, either), we have a tough road ahead of us this season.

And with the coming of age of customer review sites like Insider Pages, Judy’s Book, Angie’s List and even Yahoo, you have to treat even the dead wood leads with kid gloves for fear they might write a bad review about your company and cost you valuable business.  Every little edge you can give yourself over your competition counts.

Here’s something I tried last year that worked really well, and killed two customer service birds with one stone.  I don’t know what size and type of business you own, but for my business, I don’t have clerical staff to answer the phones and schedule appointments when I’m not in the office.  And during the season, I can’t answer some of my calls.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t answer a lot of my calls.  I rely on voicemail to serve as my first or sometimes second point of contact with prospective clients.  I try to make my message as clear and cheerful as I can, but more importantly, I promise a call back within 24 hours.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  It isn’t always.  Like that day when the skidsteer breaks down on a job site, one of your employees calls in sick forcing you to do more grunt work than you’d planned that day, and then a supplier isn’t ready with the materials they said they’d have ready, forcing you to source them somewhere else.  Today.  Because the project is half done and waiting for this one piece before it can move forward.

What if on that day, a big client called at 7:30am and heard your 24 hour turnaround promise.  You didn’t hear his message until 10pm that night.  If you happen to get engaged with something the next morning and forget, you’ve already lost some credibility with that client, and your odds of closing the sale have probably dropped by 10%.

Last season I found myself unusually on-edge about client calls because of that promise, but because of it I turned around most phone calls within a few hours of receiving them.  Even the ones we received on Saturdays and Sundays.  By making that promise I was putting our reputation and financial success on the line, and I wasn’t about to throw that away before I even spoke with the client.  And an unintended side benefit was that it set an expectation for our prospective clients; if we met that expectation by returning their call timely, we’d already taken one small step in assuring that client that their business was safe with us.

This can work for larger companies, too.  Have all those people whose jobs include client contact to make a promise to their customers about when they’ll hear back from them, whether it be about a repair issue, new business, etc.

And then keep that promise.