A Concretizen employee discusses the details of a job with the homeowner.

Business Strategies:
Customer Service
Decorative concrete contractors offer insight on good customer service for their businesses. Five contractors explain what makes their decorative concrete businesses a success, from old-fashioned customer service to cleaning up after a job.
by Wendy Ardolino

Old-fashioned values
Ira Goldberg, of Beyond Concrete in Keyport, N.J., has owned a concrete business for 23 years and been in the trade for 31 years. In that time, he has stayed with the same customer-service strategies for his decorative concrete business: "The customer is always right" and "The customer comes first." Another critical aspect of his specialty concrete company's success, Goldberg says, is always returning any customer's call within 24 hours.

Dana Boyer, owner of Concretizen, located in Apache Junction, Ariz., also has a simple style of customer service that has worked for her since she started her decorative concrete company. "My approach to customer service is still the same. I treat the customers the way I would want to be treated. I give them a product that I would personally be happy paying for. I give them educated options and let them make an informed decision."

One good way to ensure good customer service is to make sure that customers get what they want. "Our No. 1 customer service strategy is simple communication, from scheduling, to progress reports, to digital images sent to customers to show updates or completed work," says Chris Becker, owner of Becker Architectural Concrete in South St. Paul, Minn. "We want our clients to feel as though they are our only customer."

Gerald Taylor, owner of Images in Concrete, in El Dorado, Ark. also emphasizes client communication and involvement. "At Images In Concrete, Steven Ochs and I allow the client to be part of the design team," he says. "We feel that is crucial in the progression of the job. We take their ideas and create scale drawings. They cross out what they don't like. We do this to a point until it's pleasing to them and practical for us to do. Then we have them sign off. When we finish the work, they call it theirs because we really worked with their ideas."