At my company, we take pride in our workmanship, but we also pay close attention to the entire customer experience, from first contact to after the build is complete. This involves keeping the jobsite clean and orderly, interacting positively with the homeowner, following up after completion, and asking for and receiving social media reviews.
These are pretty standard customer service measures, but we’ve added another wrinkle that seems to be unusual, at least among deck builders. Shortly after wrapping up a job, we send our clients a “welcome kit.” In it, we include a cooler, a customized koozie and pen with our company’s logo and contact info, and a USB drive with all the photos and videos from the job. We use a drone to shoot some of the video, but we also make it a point to set up a GoPro camera on every job in order to produce a before-and-after time-lapse video of each project (in addition to the USB drive, we email a YouTube link of the time-lapse video to our clients so that they can share it with their friends). The kit also includes a binder that we’ve assembled with photos that summarize the job, showing the build process and highlighting some of the things they don’t get to see as we’re building.
I strongly believe this is an effective way to get referrals and to set ourselves apart from other deck builders. Need proof? Well, I got married recently, and my new wife was becoming a little peeved with how long it was taking the photographer to deliver the wedding photos. But then the photographer showed up at our door with the official photos, along with a USB drive containing all the photos that she took as well as a nice video that she had put together of our wedding day. Once my wife saw the presentation, all was forgiven and then some. That example of customer service let me know that this stuff works!