Booking New Clients & Turning Them Into Lifelong Customers With Bronco Pro Kleen

EMILY: I’m Emily Washcovick, Yelp’s Small Business Expert. On Behind the Review, I pick one review on Yelp and talk to the entrepreneur and the reviewer about the story and business lessons behind their interactions.

This week, we are excited to feature Bronco Pro Kleen, which earned a top spot on Yelp and Entrepreneur Media’s 2023 “Top 150 Mom-and-Pop shop” list. This year was the first-ever list, and featured 150 businesses across 10 distinct categories. In everything from restaurants to home pros. Just making the list at all is a big honor, so I was excited to sit down with them, and one of their customers to see how they’ve become so successful. Let’s see what’s behind this week’s review.

STACEY: So I was looking for an annual carpet cleaning service, and just looking for a vendor that I could really come back to every time I needed either a spot cleaning or an annual carpet cleaning. And I had just moved to the area about a year and a half ago. So I just started my initial research of places. I saw a lot of great businesses with a ton of great reviews, but looked through a lot of reviews and messaged a couple of businesses.

And Bronco Pro was quick at responding, their rates were reasonable, they had good availability. So that’s how I ended up going with them.

EMILY: That’s Stacey, telling us how she found Bronco’s Pro Kleen Carpet Cleaners, a carpet cleaning service in Denver, Colorado. As an avid user and reviewer on Yelp, Stacey did her research and read many positive reviews of Bronco Pro before booking them herself. Here is Stacey’s own review of the service.

STACEY: Needed cleaning done on my neglected carpets and found Bronco Pro Klean due to many solid reviews.

These reviews did not let me down. Pricing was extremely reasonable for my four bedrooms, two hallways and 14 steps of carpeted stairs. As promised, Tim called me when he was about 30 minutes away from arriving at my house, was super patient with explaining the process as it was my first time, and even gave me recommendations on spot treatment products for in between cleanings.

The process was quick, but I couldn’t be happier with those results. I’m recommending Bronco Pro to all my friends after seeing what they did for my house. Tim was great to work with, both friendly yet professional.

EMILY: What a great review! Bronco Pro Kleen has quickly become a top carpet cleaning service in Denver. I sat down with Travis, one half of the brother duo that launched Bronco Pro Kleen over a decade ago, using the experience and knowledge they gathered as kids, watching their parents in the industry.

TRAVIS: We started the business roughly 10 years ago. Actually, my father did carpets for a lot of our time growing up. I started the business with my brother and we remember going out on jobs at a younger age and working with our father and kind of just tagging along.

So, we picked up a lot back then and we felt there was a need in the Denver market for carpet cleaning. We kind of knew the business and how it ran and we watched it with our father and mother growing up, so it was a nice easy transition for us.

We had connections and we were at a spot where both my brother and myself were looking for work. We had a little bit of money saved up. We pulled it together and had enough to get a van going, and from there, we’ve just been trying to get better each and every day.

EMILY: When Travis and his brother started the business, they knew putting customer service first was the best way to ensure happy and repeat customers – as well as earn them referrals. And customer service isn’t just being friendly on site while doing the cleaning. It starts when a quote request first comes in. Bronco Pro focuses heavily on responsiveness. On Yelp, they have a 100% response rate to their customer quote requests, and they maintain a 10 minute response time to customer inquiries. Which is shockingly fast.

TRAVIS:   The Yelp mobile app helps with that. And, you know, I’m in front of the computer a lot booking jobs. And so, I get the email notification every time a customer that reaches out to us, we get pinged, we know the sound. And we want to have the best chance of landing that customer. And we want to be able to give them information as quickly as possible so that they can make a decision that’s best for them.

EMILY: We’re going to take a quick break. Be right back.

EMILY: Customers want to feel like they can trust the businesses they support, but particularly for service providers – and those that serve customers inside their own homes, building and maintaining trust is especially important. Stacey said the Bronco Pro team’s patience, transparency and education is ultimately what created such a great experience for her. Before even speaking with them, she could tell that the business was trustworthy through their customer reviews which was then reinforced with her own experience.

STACEY: I think some of the things I look for : timeliness is super important to me for a service like this. I like seeing reviews that say that they were within that time frame that they gave to their customers. That they text or called, within that timeframe that they said they’d be on the way.

And that they were also just respectful of each person’s cleanliness with their home. And in this case, they’re carpet cleaning, so obviously cleanliness is one of their top priorities. But things like the fact that, some people have said that they were willing to wear masks during the peak pandemic. That they were, wearing shoe covers where appropriate, things like that, even if they didn’t apply to my exact scenario, were important to me, because I think that makes a big difference with customer service and service, especially for people that are coming into your home.

STACEY: So he came in, he was super patient with all my questions I had. I’m pretty thorough with my questions, especially if it’s my first time experiencing something like this type of service. And he walked me through where he was going to start.

What I should expect with drying time and, if I should be careful with anything like stepping over things while it’s wet. He was even super detailed about making sure if you go on some of the wet carpet spots, just be careful with walking on the hardwood floors after, because it becomes really slippery.

And I’m really glad he took the time to point things out like that. Just super personable. And like I said, in my review, he even gave me some tips about keeping my carpets clean in between spot cleaning with my dogs; certain home remedies. He was just super great about all that.

This is for small spot cleaning. I just asked him about certain sprays and cleaning products I had at home and asked him for his input on those. He really spoke highly about a couple of products I brought up, and of course he was like, well, if there’s a really big mess or something, I know your dog gets sick or something like feel free to handle some of the spot cleaning on your own.

But if it’s a really big mess, feel free to call us out too. It was sort of a nice, I didn’t feel like I was being nickel and dimed and I felt like because of that, I could really trust his recommendations and just trust this company in general to provide the service that they’re promising, but not at the sake of like, having to come out more often than is needed, so really that trust is built.

He was also really honest with some of his responses. I wanted one of my rugs to be cleaned. He asked me the materials. Then he decided that afterwards he was like, based on the materials, I don’t want to clean it because it could be really delicate. So, we won’t charge you for this portion of it.

And I thought that was a really nice touch instead of just saying like, “well, you could have told us the material up front”, or “we’re still going to charge you for it because this is what was agreed upon”. But the service all around was great.

And again, this is an experience where I recommend all my friends to Bronco Pro, and I will definitely continue using them in future years or future incidents.

EMILY: Stacey is a Bronco Pro fanatic, and beyond her repeat business she’s referred many more customers as well. That business was earned with transparency and trust. Instead of pretending like everyday life-events requires a professional carpet clean, the Bronco Pro team member shared tips that some would see as ‘decreasing the frequency of potential cleanings with that customer’. But what Bronco Pro knows is that by helping with those things, they reinforce their expertise and let the customer know they’re not taking advantage of them.

And as far as evaluating if a material would survive a cleaning, that’s just that expertise and on-site customer service.

TRAVIS: So, anytime we first go into a customer’s home, we like to get feedback and walk the house with them. We want to know what their expectations are and we want to be able to get them as much information as possible of what we can, and we cannot do. There’s certain stains that we could get out, and there’s certain stains that we can’t. There’s certain carpets that are easier to clean than others, and that’s not something that you could really give customers information on over the phone. And so when we first show up, that’s our first step. We want to make sure that we’re on the same page.

We want to make sure that we deliver on their expectations before we ever bring our equipment into the home.

EMILY: Expectation setting is SO important. And honestly, missed expectations are probably the biggest common denominator in critical reviews. So it’s smart that the Bronco Pro team communicates those right from the start.

But that doesn’t mean every transaction or customer interaction goes perfectly. Even the most highly reviewed and rated businesses get critical feedback at times.

TRAVIS: We’ve learned a lot from our customers over time. We always love the great things that our customers say to us. But the feedback that we get from customers that’s not so good, that really helps us get better.

Over the course of 10 years, we’ve grown and we’ve been able to add a second truck. We really believe in recurring business and making customers for life. That’s kind of our target. Anytime we get into a customer’s house for the first time, we kind of see it as an audition for future business, almost like a job interview.

EMILY: Like any business owner, Travis has had ups and downs running his business. But ultimately, his team is the key to Bronco Pro Kleen’s success.

TRAVIS: We’ve been lucky enough to have some amazing people work with us over the years. That is one challenge – keeping experienced technicians, people that we could trust, people that are going to be on time, people that love the company and love our customers as much as us, and that show up to work every day

We’ve been lucky enough to get some solid guys over the years that we’ve been able to add to the team, and, you know, once we get them, we just really try to take care of them and keep them around.

EMILY: Getting feedback and reviews has a lot of value for providing owners insight into things about their services or offerings that they don’t get to see first hand, so that they can constantly improve their service and retain their customers. But sometimes it’s hard to actually get reviews—it’s not something all customers automatically do.

TRAVIS:  We really value the reviews that we get on Yelp. I believe that Yelp is a platform that people trust. So there’s a lot of traffic that comes for home services businesses from Yelp for that reason.

We do 200 plus jobs a month and we’ll only get a couple of reviews on a good month. Over time we’ve been able to build up our reviews. But you know, for us, word of mouth is very big. Return customers is very big. So we just want to give the customers the best experience possible so that they continue to use our services so that they recommend us to friends, neighbors, and family.

And if we are able to get a review out of it, that’s just the cherry on top that helps us build our business out even more by getting our information out there.