Background
- Headquarters: Provo, UT
- Locations/Offices: 39
- PCT Top 100: #7 (2020)
The award wall is getting crowded. Though numerous accolades from “Fastest Growing Company” to “Company of the Year” are becoming common, the breakneck speed of Aptive Environmental’s growth has been anything but. Founded in 2015, it was the youngest company to be featured on Glassdoor’s Top 100 U.S. workplaces for 2019. The Utah based organization is ranked one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Best Companies in America and currently holds the title of the 7th largest Pest Control company in the world according to PCT magazine’s top 100.
Providing residential and commercial pest services to more than 3,700 cities across North America, Aptive’s commitment to the customer experience sets them apart from their competition and is the fuel powering them toward their goal to become the largest pest control company on the planet. With their eyes set on a finish line putting them on top of the industry, these guys are all in.
Sale To Scale
In 2018, Aptive recruited Edmund Mackey to come on board as the Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer. Mackey’s depth of experience in digital marketing and business development made him the perfect fit for Aptive’s aggressive ambitions. Knowing that Aptive had mastered their sales strategy, Mackey began focusing on customer retention and experience. “My problem is not sales.” states Mackey, “My problem is being able to scale an organization that can actually service the customer, their calls, their issues… making it easy for them to do business with us. That has been the bigger problem.”
In the pursuit of a plan to scale the company while improving the customer experience, Mackey met with Taylor Olson, CEO of Slingshot, a 24/7 sales and support solution for home services providers. When presented with this unique challenge Olson rolled up his sleeves and got creative.
The Slingshot Solution
Olson and his colleagues decided to develop a team of sales and support agents designated specifically and exclusively for Aptive. These agents were trained on Aptive’s scripts and sales strategies to provide a consistent customer experience. This approach has been an invaluable asset for Aptive who now recognize their relationship with Slingshot as an essential partnership. “I consider them an extension of my team.” explains Mackey, “They’ve been charged with delivering a seamless experience for the customer, whether it’s a sales call or a service call. That process has been very collaborative, very flexible, and very adaptive.”
Ready For Action
Shortly after this Aptive specific team of agents was created at Slingshot, it’s efficacy was put to the test. A power outage in the Baltimore/DC area prevented several Aptive employees from coming in to work which would have left about 40,000 customers without access to Aptive services, but because Slingshot agents were ready and waiting to take their calls and respond to their needs, not a single customer was neglected. “If we hadn’t had Slingshot scaled for that,” relates Mackey, “I don’t know what we would have done as a company because there was literally no one in those branches to answer calls.”
In speaking to the challenges of scaling and staffing for a company set on becoming a billion dollar business, Mackey further explains the benefits of utilizing a reliable third party, “Call volume is a finicky thing for anyone who’s tried to run a call center, or even a branch. Being able to predict the time of day a call is going to occur affects staffing. You might need 150 people in the mornings to answer calls, but only need 75 or so at night.” He continues, “That’s the value Slingshot brings. We’re able to scale up with them in the mornings. That gives us the opportunity to have a more quality hiring process, a more quality training process, a more quality rep experience, because we’re not asking them to rush through calls at certain times of the day or certain times of the week and we can ensure that every call has a certain level of quality to it.”
Pest World Domination
When becoming the biggest and the best is your goal, being all in with your customers, your employees and your partners is an essential piece of the pie. Fostering relationships and collaborating with people that understand and work to help you reach that goal makes getting there a reality. “We want to be the best services company in the world. We believe that if we continue to focus keenly on the customer and serve the needs of that customer, all of the other things will happen.”
