The salesmen are taken care of much more and compensated much more generously than Service Pros. I understand their pay is performance based, but this leads to more problems. In my area at least, the salesmen will tell the customers whatever they want to hear to make a sale. IE: saying we treat for mosquitoes, saying we are able to spray the entire yard with pesticide. Us service pros are the second person from the company the customer sees, so we end up hearing about it and having to deal with the repercussions. At my particular branch when this is brought up the service managers say “it’s above them” and they can’t directly do anything about it.
Also it is downright misleading to call the chemicals we use “product” instead of pesticide because pesticide sounds “scary.” This is managements philosophy.
The “on the job training” I received was extremely unprofessional and unrelated to the kind of routes I ended up running as well. I trained with someone who exclusively ran quarterly routes and I ended up doing only initial services. The procedures are different for initials and quarterlies, from the kind of pesticide you use to how info is recorded and how you interact with the customers. I have to wing it and answer my customers questions with google on a daily basis.
Last but not least, my two service managers constantly tell us it’s alright to spray in the rain no matter what, when the pesticide labels themselves say it’s not because of runoff. For a company that prides itself on responsible use of pesticide, they don’t seem to follow that mantra all too much and end up spraying first and asking questions later.
