Chris Polito heard a restaurateur being interviewed on the radio. What the food impresario had to say about customer service has been a guiding principal of Pool Environments ever since.
“He said, ‘If you’re going to give something away, give it away with a smile, or you lose twice,’” recalls Polito, president of the Plano, Texas firm. “That’s the philosophy we have.”
That means if a customer isn’t completely satisfied with, say, a plaster finish, Pool Environments will perform a redo at a deep discount, and they’ll do it happily, even if that means absorbing some costs.
What other builders spend on pay-per-click ads and direct mail, Pool Environments puts toward delivering a client’s dream pool.
“We don’t advertise, and so we use that money to try to make our clients happy, even if [a problem is] their fault,” says Polito, whose firm builds 60 to 70 high-end custom pools a year.
Sometimes that means dipping into those theoretical marketing dollars to overcome budget constraints. Polito recalls building a pool as a subcontractor for a landscape architect. They had a tile allowance of $15 per square foot, but the project called for more tile than was budgeted. The architect was going to pass the difference on to the customer. But Polito offered to take the hit. The customer couldn’t have been more pleased.
“Her voice was almost cracking with emotion,” Polito says. “It was, ‘You would do that?’”
He adds: “Eight hundred dollars on a $150,000 job is nothing, but at least I could get some goodwill out of it.”
Pool Environments takes a similar approach to pool service. The firm offers a premium plan that includes yearly equipment examinations and leak inspections. If a problem occurs within 30 to 45 days of the check-up, repairs are made at a significant discount.
Pool Environments not only strives to build pools with quality and integrity, but to maintain them in the same manner.
“It keeps us in their backyards,” Polito says.
