PMP Growth Summit 2025: Customer Roundtable

Attendees at the 2025 PMP Growth Summit who participated in the Wednesday and Thursday morning breakfast roundtables found the early rise worthwhile. The opportunity offered attendees a chance for a candid discussion on customer relations.

What follows are just a few highlights.

“We made a ‘new customers’ sheet. The technician hands one to every new customer. It explains things like what a reservice, or callback, entails. It lets them fill in their contact information, how they want to pay and how they want to be contacted. We add this information to their notes, and it has helped a lot.” — Chris Baumbach, president, Texas Pest Rx, Floresville, Texas

“I remind our technicians that 95 percent of customers will love them and are happy they are there because they’re solving a pest control problem. The other 5 percent will be mad at them because they weren’t there yesterday, and there’s a pest problem: ‘It has nothing to do with you and who you are, and everything to do with them and their situation.’ There have been times when we’ve had such rude customers cursing out our technicians that we cancel the contract and say, ‘We’re not the right company for you.’ We don’t want our technicians to deal with customers like that.” — Scott Goldman, CFO, Big Blue Bug Solutions, Providence, R.I.

“The potential clients who give us a hard time — I don’t want them as clients. If the client is being unreasonable and demanding, I’m not going to put myself and my family in that situation. We tell them, ‘Sorry, we’re just not a good fit.’ Or if they want something done by a certain deadline that is unreasonable, we tell them, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that, but let me find somebody who can.’ I’ll call somebody I know and say, ‘This is what they need. You might mesh with them better. I’m not comfortable working with them.’” — Joe Gorgone, manager, Gardens Pest Control, North Palm Beach, Fla.

“We used to get called out for dead smokeybrown cockroaches constantly. We started training our technicians on how to explain the treatment process to customers. Let them know they will see some dead cockroaches and others on their backs, dying and kicking their legs. Some customers are ready to call us out for one dead cockroach, so we want to head it off on the front end. It has greatly improved the callback rate.” — Kevin Hathorne, training and technical director, Terminix Service, Columbia, S.C.

“You can’t teach technicians a good work ethic. You can’t teach them respect. Let’s be real: We all do the same thing, with some variation. Our customers are our strength — and how our employees relate to them, from the office to in the field, is what sets us all apart.” — Josh Petersen, head of operations, Zunex Pest Control, Orem, Utah