What a Bad Yellow Jacket Season Taught Kwik Kill About Reservice Rates

 A few years back, Breanna Neerland noticed something off in the numbers at Kwik Kill Pest Control.

"We saw our reservice rate increase during yellow jacket season, and it made me question if our material was working properly," said the vice president of the company in Madison, Wis.

She dug in, found the product wasn't performing the way it had, and switched materials. 

"The next year, the reservice rate was significantly lower," she said.

Every reservice is a truck roll a company already paid for once: in fuel, drive time, and labor, without collecting anything new. Left unchecked, a rising rate doesn't just cost a day of scheduling. It quietly widens the gap between the jobs a company sells and the profit it actually banks from them.

FieldRoutes software, on which Kwik Kill operates, turns every reservice into a data point, tracking the reason behind each callback so operators can catch a pattern in training, materials, or scheduling before it quietly eats into margin.

The rate is a symptom, not the problem

Neerland calls reservice "a bucket with a hole in the bottom that will never get filled." 

A client forgets to unlock a gate. A technician misses a spot. A pest keeps chewing new entry points. 

There are dozens of reasons a crew has to go back out, and Neerland has learned that most of them point somewhere specific if you look.

She found that out again with a rodent-proofing service. 

"That's odd, why are we doing this?" she asked. 

Digging in, she found there had been a lapse in training and client communications. A full team retraining fixed it almost immediately.

"It can really expose different opportunities for you to be able to drill in on and improve on," she said.

Tracking inside FieldRoutes

Kwik Kill assigns every reservice a distinct service type in FieldRoutes so office staff can break the rate down by reason and review it weekly, then again month to date, quarter to date and year to date.

"That's what allows us to say, 'Hey, it's yellow jacket season, maybe our year-to-date is still within the threshold that we want to see, but this month or this quarter, it is not,’” Neerland said. “‘Something's going on. We need to dive into it further.'" 

Kwik Kill's threshold sits below 2% of all services provided. Neerland estimates the industry average runs 4% to 6%. 

Route density helps hold the line on cost: With 20 routes covering a 30-mile radius around Madison, a technician is usually already close by when a callback comes in.

Consistency and transparency close the gap

Neerland points to training and client education as the rest of the answer. Technicians explain to customers up front how a treatment actually works, including the three-week lag before an ant colony's queen runs out of workers.

She also pushes her team to look inward before blaming a client when reservice volume climbs.

 "It's very easy to say, 'Oh, it's not our material, it's not our team,'" she said. "But it's really important to have that overlook to be able to say, 'We're getting way too many calls on this, and this shouldn't be happening. What's going on?'"

It's the same instinct that caught the yellow jackets. The rate told her something. She just had to ask what.