It seems impossible, but Bill Haynes, owner of Haynes Exterminating, attained a customer retention rate of 99.4 percent in 2012. In fact, in honor of this amazing retention rate, Haynes was honored with the highest retention award from Dow AgroSciences at the 2012 National Certified Sentricon Specialist™ Meeting, held in Atlanta.

After becoming a Certified Sentricon Specialist^™ (CSS) in 2010, Haynes Exterminating reports great success with the Sentricon^® System with Always Active^™ technology.

Though he says his metro Atlanta Company didn’t set out specifically to have an amazing customer retention rate, they have made a few recent changes that he thinks contributed to this retention rate.

“In the past we were carefree about how hard we’d go after renewals,” admits Haynes. “I didn’t want to be a pest and hassle people, but that was my mistake. So in the last couple years, we really made an effort to contact our customers. Once we reached out to them, we saw a significant increase in our overall retention rate.

“I had our service manager, Paul, call everyone,” Haynes continues. “We made every attempt to communicate with our bait customers and our liquid customers, too.

“Communication is the key – that’s the truth about this whole business. We even went so far as to drop by and leave a note on someone’s door if we were in the neighborhood,” he says.

Haynes Exterminating is a small company with 6 regular employees. They had offered other bait systems in the past, but Haynes says he has worked hard promoting Sentricon since becoming a CSS.

“Sentricon with Always Active provided a good business model for us,” he explains. “We upgraded customers to Sentricon without a fee because we were trying to build credibility. We worked hard to make sure people understood the benefit of Sentricon. It was mutually beneficial because our customers were happy that they had constantly-baited stations and we like it because of the yearly servicing.”