Creating a new digital customer experience for customers of TruGreen, the leading lawn care provider in the U.S.
TruGreen came to Metova looking to engage directly with customers of their lawn care services. While TruGreen had been in business for decades and was the market leader with over 2 million subscribers, their customers were looking for more access, more control and more transparency with improved communication through their connected devices.
“Metova is sensitive to the transparency and exposure that releasing mobile applications brings to a company. Metova implemented analytics and reporting that allows TruGreen to make informed decisions about the future of their apps.”
Challenge
In order to ensure that TruGreen’s customer needs were met, a few key objectives had to be delivered while creating new business opportunities and efficiencies :
- Mobile Service – Put the full control of a customer’s lawn services, subscription level and onboarding into new applications for iPhone and Android smartphones
- Enhanced Communication – Shift from communicating exclusively through direct mail and telemarketing calls to include mobile push notifications, alerts and notifications regarding customer subscriptions, on-site service calls, account changes and
- New Marketing Tools – With in-app notifications, promotions, push notifications and service alerts, the mobile application would serve to increase revenue and conversions
- Reduce Customer Churn – Phone calls and direct mail can be costly and difficult to reach existing customers, with the mobile application installed communicating directly with customers when they have concerns and alerting anyone who’s subscription has lapsed would provide a stronger ability to retain customers
In addition, this would be the first mobile experience for TruGreen and it was important to deliver a strong customer experience. While TruGreen customers were depending on mobile solutions for other services and had high expectations for what they needed a mobile solution from TruGreen to deliver.
How TruGreen Solved It With Metova
Metova designed and developed a customer mobile app and API to allow self-service including marketing and signing up for new services, integrating with the fleet management solution to send notifications when techs are in route, see the tech in route on a map, and send a followup NPS survey as soon as the tech completes the work order. The solution also handles PCI Compliance, eCommerce and Live Chat.
Results
- TruGreen was able to deliver 1MM mobile installations ahead of schedule
- Mobile generated revenue beat expectations by over 3X
- Customer application reviews exceeded 4 stars on both platforms
Lessons Learned
Good planning can go a long way, having user stories, requirements, documentation, and plans up to two sprints out has been critical to ensuring that we can follow a strict release schedule with TruGreen’s marketing team. There can be a lot of moving parts, so ensure you are documenting everything along the way as you build, from releases to best practices, to root-cause analysis, all of these serve as good retrospectives and tools in achieving a good pace and release schedule with the client.
The Technology Solution
Native iOS & Android Mobile apps that interact with a Ruby on Rails API hosted on AWS which serves as a proxy to multiple internal TruGreen services. AWS services used: Classic Load Balancer, Auto Scaling group of 4-12 EC2 m4.large, RDS DB db.m4.xlarge, multi-AZ RDS standby, ECR, CloudWatch, Elasticache, Lambda, Route53, and SNS/SQS/S3
