Background
- Headquarters:Troy, Michigan
- Year Founded: 1860
- # of Clients: 45,675
- 2020 PCT Top 100: #25
There Can Be Only One…
There are many pest control companies that can trace their origins back to the early 20th century, but there is only one company that holds the title of the nation’s oldest pest control business. Founded in 1860, Rose Pest Solutions has been around since before the Civil War. Though now based in Troy, Michigan, founder Solomon Rose started out in Cincinnati, Ohio exterminating rats with chemicals he formulated himself. It was almost 100 years later when a second office was established in Grand Rapids. Other locations soon followed in Toledo and Saginaw, Michigan. Rose Pest continued to grow with acquisitions and new ventures in the pest industry over the next 70 years and now ranks #25 on the PCT Top 100.
Industry veteran and Vice President of Sales & Regional Manager at Rose, Bill Welsh, has seen the company evolve and adapt over the course of his career. It was about five years ago that he began observing an unsettling trend. “When any of our customers would declare an emergency, they were calling our answering service who would then wake up our managers and supervisors in the middle of the night,” Welsh recalls. “That was happening more frequently and everyone was getting frustrated.”
Modern Solutions
In search of a solid strategy to deal with after hour customer needs and requests, Welsh flew to Utah. After being introduced to Slingshot, a 24/7 customer support solution for home services providers, at an industry event, Welsh wanted proof that Slingshot could back up their promise of five-star, around-the-clock customer service and engagement. They did not disappoint. After spending just one day touring the offices and speaking further with Slingshot CEO, Taylor Olson, Welsh determined he’d found the right people to solve his problem.
“After we brought Slingshot on board, the emergency calls dropped significantly. They would take the calls and figure out what was really going on,” Welsh reports. “Slingshot also knew which accounts to push forward to us that needed immediate attention versus those that could just be handled with the reassurance from a live operator that a Rose Pest professional would contact them first thing in the morning.”
As the partnership between Rose & Slingshot grew, Rose Pest saw a decline in the frequency of late-night emergencies, which resulted in fewer middle-of-the-night calls to managers and supervisors—and more scheduled-out appointments for those that were not true emergencies. Because of this, Welsh says, the business has seen an increase in its return on investment (ROI). It’s also been a newfound benefit to staff members.
New Perspectives
As with any successful business relationship, flexibility and adaptability are key to progress. Because Slingshot handles not only inbound and outbound customer support and scheduling, but also sales, working out the details of a sales strategy between Rose’s existing customer support team and Slingshot agents took some time and thoughtful navigation. “We tweaked and molded processes as we went along. It was a wholesale change from what we’d been doing for eons. From the point of call to the point of first service used to take up to a week, now we’ve got that down to the same day or next day. Slingshot shifted our perspective on that,” recounts Welsh. “Now everything can be handled in one phone call from qualifying and scheduling to selling and payment. It’s been a dramatic difference that really helped us better understand the client experience.”
After 160 years of successfully serving their customers, it’s clear that Rose Pest Solutions has figured out a thing or two about that client experience and what it takes to foster and maintain those critical relationships built on a solid reputation. Entrusting a third party not only to interact with your customers on your behalf, but also fundamentally change the way those interactions are managed, takes the utmost confidence in their professionalism. Slingshot has provided Rose Pest with that assurance since joining forces four years ago. With trusted partners on their side and a focus on their customers, Rose is likely to hold the honor of nation’s oldest pest provider for many years to come.
By the Numbers
- After-hours and Weekend Sales: 23%
- 2020 # of Interactions: 16,564
- 2020 New Revenue: $714,659
- 2020 ROI: 611%
