A low score on a customer service audit showed its absence; a big jump in rank one year later proved its presence.
"That was a wake up call that we were going off track," Scherer says of the audit that took place in 2000. Customer satisfaction was all the more important to Scherer since he and his field operation manager, Steve Mundinger, had purposely steered the company into residential service to augment its existing commercial service. Since its start in 1995, residential service has steadily increased and brought in $1 million in revenue last year from a total of $2.5 million. Currently, the company has 15 service trucks and employs a total of 27 people.