Do Your Clients Trust You?

Pet sitting is a trust based business, there’s no way around it. Your clients are letting you freely and alone into the most valuable thing they own, their home, to watch the things that are most dear to them, their pets. Either one of these in themselves would be a huge leap of faith and until they’ve really gotten to know you, a leap of blind faith.

This trust factor is further complicated by the fact that in many cases you, as the business owner, are doing the initial meet and greets with new clients and then you’re sending sitters, that the client may not have met personally, into homes. This means you need to be able to give that potential new client a feeling of confidence that they are in good hands with you and your people. This trust building starts before you even meet your clients for the first time in the ways you deliver your marketing messages and then kicks into high gear as soon as you have that first conversation with a potential client. That initial conversation, typically by phone, is critical to setting the groundwork for a great relationship. It’s important to form a connection as soon as possible and luckily, pets are the perfect topic to get people talking. A great pet sitter asks questions about the pets. Not just the standard how many pets and what kind are they questions but more personal questions about how they came to have the pets, what their names are and what their personalities are like. This will set a warm tone for the meet and greet to come.

At the meet and greet you’re there to accomplish a goal; get the pet’s care information, meet the pets and determine the pet sitting need. As importantly, though, you’re there to continue to build that level of trust. You of course want to provide information regarding the safety precautions you take as a business such as insurance and employee vetting and training but the conversation needs to go beyond this. Clients need to feel comfortable that their pets will be in the best possible hands and that they’ll be loved and cared for by the sitter like they would themselves. Clients often have some level of guilt that they have to leave their pets in the care of a sitter and they want to feel, not just that the basic care tasks are being done, but that their pets are happy and that you as a sitter enjoy spending time with their pets.

Once you’ve completed the meet and greet and successfully signed the client up you will continue to form that trusting relationships through your regular visit updates. With well written and thoughtful updates and pictures you have the ability to form a long term trust filled relationship with your client that will be a benefit to all!