Aaron Curtis has run the cancellation numbers at Alta Pest Control more times than he can count. Price kept coming up. So did moves, and collections, and all the usual suspects.
Then Alta paid for a deeper look, three rounds of third-party market research over two years.
"We thought they were very price-sensitive, very price-driven," said Curtis, the customer experience officer at the Round Rock, Texas, company, which ranks No. 26 on the PCT Top 100. "But as we really dug into it, we were able to get a deeper analysis that showed it was really caused by friction during their first few days."
Not bad service. Not price. Friction. In the first week.
And once even a negative impression sets in, nine months of clean, professional service can still struggle to overcome it. Curtis believes most operators are carrying this same misdiagnosis without knowing it — and that most haven't stopped to question it.
"I just don't think anyone's really talking about it," Curtis said. "It's true for us. It's true for them. It's true for all of us. And that's this concept of realizing that customers decide how they feel about us almost immediately."
Here's the framework Alta built to fix it.
The gap between what a customer is sold and what they experience in the days after signup is where doubt begins.
Curtis describes three typical friction points:
A slow path to the first appointment.
Silence between the sale and the first service.
A technician showing up before the customer fully understands what to expect.
"Customers aren't just buying pest control," Curtis said. "They're buying confidence. They're buying peace of mind."
The starting point for any operator is the same question Alta asked: Are cancellations that get coded as price actually rooted in something that happened, or didn't happen, in Week 1?
Curtis believes fewer than 5% of operators run a first-week sequence with the intentionality required to answer that question. Most are solving for the wrong problem.
Alta's first-week sequence begins the moment a customer signs.
Through a third-party integration connected to FieldRoutes via open API, every new customer immediately receives a welcome video from company leadership. The video covers what they've committed to and what they're entitled to, or what Curtis calls a customer bill of rights.
The purpose isn't legal. It's perceptual. When customers know what the standard looks like, a deviation reads as a fixable exception rather than proof the company isn't what they were sold.
"Imagine left to their own devices," Curtis said. "They'd think, 'Wow, this is how the company is designed.' No. There are going to be flaws. There are going to be hiccups. We don't want customers taking away that is the norm."
Alta aims to get every new customer on the schedule within 72 hours of signup. Research suggests that window is the threshold most customers expect before they start looking elsewhere. FieldRoutes scheduling and route templates, Curtis said, make that standard achievable at scale.
But here’s what else happens in that first week:
After the first service, the Alta Pest Control technician sends the customer a personalized video and photos. The technician closes the loop:Here's what we promised, here's what we did, here's what you should know about your property.
The day after, a personal email — not a generic notification, not a form letter — arrives from the office manager of that location. "We hope that this was off to a great start,” Curtis said. “Here's our information. We care about you."
Three days later, a branded follow-up reinforces the local contact and reminds the Alta Pest Control customer what they have access to. “We just want to once again reiterate, and if you need anything, save this local number,” Curtis said. “Here's the one we're going to text. We're going to communicate with you. Here is the local number where you can now reach us."
One week. Five touchpoints.
“These forms of communication all happen within that first week of their experience,” Curtis said. “That's pretty powerful.”
At one point, financial reminder triggers were firing on day one, day two and day seven — even for Alta Pest Control customers carrying minimal balances.
The intent was revenue protection. The result was attrition.
"We were so adamant: 'We've got to make sure they know they owe us money,'" Curtis said.
When the data showed those automated notifications were driving cancellations, not preventing them, Alta stripped the cadence back.
The principle applies broadly: Communication volume isn't the goal. Intentional communication is.
"You don't want to bug your customers, but silence is a killer because it essentially is replacing you with their own thoughts," Curtis said. "We love our customers, but they're not as educated in our industry as we are."
Every touchpoint should serve the customer's clarity, momentum or confidence. If it doesn't, it's friction in disguise.
Alta launched a customer feedback form in February, embedded throughout the customer journey in FieldRoutes Trigger Rules and invoices. More than 250 customers have submitted responses. Curtis reads every one.
"It's awesome if you decide you're going to do something about it," he said. "It's terrible, and you will kill your customer base, if you make it meaningless. You actually have to care."
Alta is experiencing double-digits improvement in early-life customer retention. Sentiment scores are climbing.
Curtis doesn't attribute all of it to the onboarding overhaul, and he won't. But the direction has been consistent since the first-week sequence was rebuilt, and Alta Pest Control isn’t the only company in the industry with a stake. Curtis said some of the largest operators in pest control have been open about sharing what's working in their own onboarding programs, a level of candor he finds rare in other industries.
"One thing I'll say about our industry," Curtis said, "is we're great at opening up our information and sharing it."
Most operators aren't losing customers over price. They're losing them in the first seven days.
And that, at least, is fixable.
