TruGreen + Qualtrics

What if the problem you've been solving for years isn't actually the problem?

That's the question TruGreen, with 2.5 million customers, 260 locations, and $1.7 billion in annual revenue, had to sit with. For years, their data said customers were leaving over price. So they worked on price. Adjusted offers. Ran retention discounts. And watched churn stay exactly where it was.

The data wasn't lying. The method of collecting it was.

When TruGreen finally heard what customers were actually saying, not what a rep had selected from a dropdown after a cancellation call, but what customers said in their own words, at scale, across 1.4 million calls, the answer was unambiguous: 71% of cancellations were driven by service quality and experience. Not price.

They didn't have a pricing problem. They had a listening problem.

The math that made retention non-negotiable

At TruGreen, one percentage point of customer retention is worth approximately $10 million in annual revenue and $5 million in EBITDA. Not a one-time gain, but a compounding one. Model it out for a 10-point improvement, from 70% retention to 80%, and the numbers become hard to argue with: $70 million in revenue and 11% customer growth in year one, compounding into $500 million in revenue, 40% customer growth, and $175 million in EBITDA by year five. Nearly four times more value than leadership had originally assumed.

TruGreen had always known retention mattered, but they did not know much of it they were leaving on the table.

The wrong answer

Every time a TruGreen customer cancelled, a customer service rep selected a reason from a dropdown menu. The output was consistent and, at face value, logical: price was the number one driver of cancellations, accounting for 29% of churned customers. So TruGreen worked on price. And retention stayed flat.

The problem wasn't the data. It was the architecture. A rep choosing from a pre-set list of categories isn't listening — it's categorizing. The distinction matters enormously at scale.

When TruGreen partnered with Qualtrics in 2024 and deployed AI-powered conversation analytics across 100% of its care and sales calls, the picture shifted completely. For the first time, TruGreen wasn't relying on a rep's best-guess categorization, it was listening to what customers actually said, at scale, across 1.4 million cancellation calls.
 

What listening at scale actually looks like

Knowing the problem and solving it are two different things. TruGreen had 2.5 million customers, 60 million annual touchpoints, and a business that ran at the speed of field service — hundreds of thousands of lawn visits every week, each one a moment where trust could be built or broken.

To close the loop at that scale, TruGreen needed to hear from customers constantly, not once a year on an NPS survey, but after every interaction. They replaced lengthy surveys with a post-service micro-survey: a thumbs up, a thumbs down, and an open comment field, deployed after every single service visit. Customers who would never complete a 10-minute survey had no friction at all giving a quick thumbs response after a lawn visit.

In doing so, TruGreen went from 500,000 annual survey responses to 500 million signals, a 1,000x increase in customer feedback volume, and a fundamentally different ability to see what was actually happening across the business.

More signals provided them the ability to act before a frustrated customer became a cancelled customer.

While the analytics were revealing what was driving churn, TruGreen's frontline data was pointing toward what could stop it.

When a specialist talked to a customer at their home, that customer was 50% more likely to say they trusted TruGreen. When a specialist engaged with a customer, any conversation, any touchpoint, they were twice as likely to receive the company's highest satisfaction rating.

That showed retention wasn't a pricing lever. It was a relationship lever. Relationship + trust = retention.

That insight became the organizing principle for TruGreen's transformation. TruGreen redesigned both the customer and employee experience around it, launching CX and EX programs simultaneously — because one cannot work without the other. Employees have to believe in the company first, because they are the ones delivering the experience to the customer.

Coaching specialists on relationship-building behaviors and redesigning frontline training delivered immediate results. Branches piloting the new approach saw customer satisfaction scores jump by 9 points. Employee engagement climbed from 53% to 73% over three years. Employee retention improved by 40%.

The loyalty equation was working in both directions at once. The question was whether TruGreen could sustain it at the scale of 2.5 million customers — and that would require a different kind of help.

When AI meets empathy

Even with a transformed frontline and a 1,000x increase in feedback signals, TruGreen faced a fundamental constraint: the sheer volume of customer issues that needed a response was simply too great for human follow-up alone.

That's where Qualtrics Experience Agents came in, not to replace human connection, but to protect and expand it.

TruGreen tested Experience Agents during a pilot to handle the moment immediately after a negative survey response: the critical window when a customer is still frustrated, still deciding whether to stay or go. The agent's job is to step in instantly, acknowledge the concern, educate where needed, and take tangible action — so that by the time a human specialist follows up, the situation is already on its way to resolution.

Consider a customer who submits a thumbs-down after noticing weeds still in their lawn following a treatment. Within moments, they receive a response that:

• Opens with empathy: Acknowledging the frustration directly
• Educates gently: Explaining how post-emergent weed treatments work, and why visible results take 10 to 14 days
• Responds in context: Referencing their actual service date and giving a specific expected resolution date
• Takes ownership: Committing to a follow-up email in two weeks to check on lawn progress
• Anticipates their next question: Proactively answering what they can do in the meantime

Two weeks later, the agent follows up automatically. If weeds are still a problem, an AI ticketing agent creates a high-priority ticket for a human specialist to take over.

The system is designed around the principle of resolving what can be resolved instantly, and freeing human agents for the moments that genuinely require a human touch.

The pilot validated the approach immediately. Within the first week, 51% of customer concerns were addressed satisfactorily. Escalations dropped by over 30%. Today, 35% of all customer outreach is handled autonomously by Experience Agents, with an approval rating above 50%, while human specialists are freed to focus on the complex, relationship-defining interactions where their time matters most. Capacity to proactively reach out and close the loop increased by 33% without adding a single headcount.

TruGreen's Experience Agents function because the data foundation was already in place. Each agent understands the customer's service history, their specific complaint, their expected resolution window — because that information was already being captured and connected across every touchpoint. The listening and insight layers aren't prerequisites for the technology. They're prerequisites for intelligence. Without them, you have automation. With them, you have a system that can act like it knows the customer, because it does.

The equation, solved

TruGreen's journey with Qualtrics is, by their own description, still in progress. The goal of 80% retention remains ahead. NPS has climbed from 4 to 34, from a score reflecting widespread detraction to one considered genuinely good, with a long-term target of 50 or higher. Four points of retention have been recovered.

The business impact of that recovery is starting to show. Proactive outreach drives 789 basis points of incremental retention compared to passive response. Combined with the 33% increase in engagement capacity, TruGreen is on track to retain an additional 10,000 customers in 2026, generating $3–4M in EBITDA.

But the numbers, as compelling as they are, aren't the real story.

TruGreen spent years solving the wrong problem — optimizing for price when the answer was experience, chasing efficiency when the answer was relationship, building new customer acquisition muscle when the answer was retention. It took genuinely listening at scale, across every channel and touchpoint, to see the truth.

There's more road ahead. That's not a hedge — it's the nature of the work. Customer relationships aren't a problem you solve once. They're something you earn, continuously, one interaction at a time. TruGreen knows that now in a way they didn't three years ago. The foundation is in place. The model is working. And the best evidence of that isn't a number — it's that the organization doesn't want to stop.