Complaint Review: Insight Pest Solutions - CT

Don’t be fooled by nice, new vehicles, salespeople with segways and tablets, and service technicians wearing nice uniforms. This company doesn’t care about handling your pest issue as much as it cares about taking your money. There is no such thing as quality control. Most of the service technicians are lazy, as they are not incentivized to successfully treat your pest problem, but to get through the stop so you can be billed. Part of the problem is that the schedule is too much. We are expected to service between 12-18 properties per day. Since we are paid based on production, not an hourly wage, the more time I spend doing quality work at one customer’s house means that I have less time to complete my route for the day, and less work completed means less pay. The pressure is intense. We don’t have time to spend with our families. The day starts at 7 am and usually doesn’t end until 7 pm. During the summer, it was 6 days a week. Promotions aren’t handed out to people that do quality work. Everything depends on how well you can play internal politics and the numbers that you produce. I was fixing our Lead Technician’s route for months. None of the homes had termite monitors, even though customers paid for these to be installed on the first service. The company has too many pointless rules in place and tries to micromanage everything, but they manage all of the wrong things. For example, we weren’t allowed to park in a customer’s driveway. The reason given for this is because, supposedly, some employee in another branch got hit by a customer’s car in the driveway. The downside to this was increased fatigue and time consumption. If I had to walk from your property to my vehicle parked in the street 4-5 times, carrying equipment further, that made me more tired. I’m not a machine. I’m human. On a summer day it was brutal, especially when you have as many properties to service as we do and being forced to wear button up, business style shirts, with shirts underneath. They also want you to do things in a specific order, which is pointless. Who cares what order it’s done in, as long as it’s done. They expected us to de-web and dust a customer’s home at the soffits, eaves, overhangs, and doorways. De-webbing and dusting consisted of removing spider webs from a customer’s home using an extension pole with a brush attached at the end. They wanted insecticide granules applied 10-15 feet around the perimeter of a customer’s house, and of course, spraying the foundation. Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to any of these things. I think these are good aspects of the service. The problem is we didn’t have time to do all of these tasks and still complete our entire workload for the day. They expected everything to be done in 30 min, that’s fine. It can be done in 30 min, but when you have 18 stops, that’s 9 hours of work and not accounting for travel time to get from one property to the next. So, naturally, we had to 'cut corners’. There’s just no other way. Everyone of my co-workers cut corners on some aspect of the service. Some partially de-webbed and others didn’t de-web at all. Some didn’t apply the granular insecticide, etc. Personally, I de-webbed only the doorways and visible webs on the lower portion of the house. Rather than apply the dust treatment to the brush, I treated the upper areas with liquid insecticide. As I was spraying the foundation of the house, I raised my sprayer wand and treated the eaves and overhangs, as long as there weren’t blooming plants, tables, toys or grills underneath. This not only saved time, but was more effective as you can apply more product to those areas. In the end, I achieved the desired effect for the customer, as well as shaved a few minutes off of each service. A point of contention for me was treating in the rain. Applying pesticides in the rain is restricted by the label on the pesticides, and any application that is made that is inconsistent with the label is against Federal Law. The reason treating in the rain is prohibited is because there is a good chance that the product will run-off into storm drains or other non-target areas, and is also not nearly as effective. Pesticides are extremely toxic to fish and other aquatic life and is difficult to filter out. Routinely, managers told us that we can apply granular or liquid insecticide in light rain. I challenged them on this and reminded them that the labels didn’t state that. Most labels state "Do not make applications in the rain”. It was a clear directive which wasn’t open to interpretation. I had to overcome this by performing inspections, sealing rodent entry points, installing termite monitors that weren’t previously installed, and anything that I could legally do while still being able to bill the customer. If the customer was home, I asked them to allow me to treat their basement for spiders, and set mouse traps in the basement and garage. The customer service center couldn’t be more inept. They double booked appointments into the same time frames without taking distances into account. Many times, I was late to an appointment before the day even begun. So I ended up having to make judgment calls based on priority. Basically, I saw what the issue was for a particular appointment and judged accordingly. Interior issues were more important to me, and the customer, than exterior issues. So if customer A was having an interior issue, then I prioritized that over customer B, who was only having an exterior issue. The sales people are liars. Management chalked up complaints about them to 'miscommunications’, but that was just a nice way of putting it. The fact was that they would tell the customers anything to get them to sign up. They would tell customers there was no penalty to cancel the agreement, they would sign customers up for services they didn’t need, they told them that the company used ornagic products, that woodpecker holes were carpenter bee holes, that the technicians would kill groundhogs, chipmunks, and other wildlife which we had no licenses to kill. This was a huge problem for myself and some others. Many times I had to tell customers the truth, which they appreciated. After explaining it, some of them would decide to keep the service and some would refuse. But that was their decision to make. If you can’t sell a service on its merits and have to lie, then you shouldn’t be in sales. It got so bad that the company started requiring the technicians to go over a customer checklist with a new customer to ensure that they understood that there was a 1 year agreement and that there was a penalty to cancel, as well as other parameters of the services. Everything fell on the already overworked technician. If a contract needed to be signed because the salesman didn’t get the signature, we had to get the signature. If payment wasn’t collected, we had to collect the payment. If the sale wasn’t even closed, they sent us out anyway to try and close the sale, but we weren’t paid commission for that. I refused to close any sale for any salesperson. It’s not that I didn’t want to be a team player, but we were already doing more than our fair share of work. I wasn’t going to close a deal for a lying salesman. I even talked some people out of the service, usually elderly widows on limited incomes. On one occasion, an old lady told me that she wanted to get the service to protect her dog from ticks. The dog was very special to her as her husband spent his final moments in his deathbed with this dog. The salesperson exploited her feelings for the dog to to oversell her on a contract for services she could barely afford to control only one pest. Since the contract wasn’t enforceable until after services were rendered, my advice to her was "buy a tick and flea collar or other preventative treatment from your vet and save yourself the $500”. She thanked me for my honesty and I never saw her again. Adam Villarreal, the primary owner, likes to portray himself as a stand up guy. His 'Welcome Videos’ that he sends to new customers are designed to give the impression that the company is honest, professional and family orientated. It was clear to me early on that this was not the case. So I went elsewhere. The money was good, that was about the only thing good about the company, but I found similar work with good pay and a much better work-life balance at a local company. My prediction is that Insight Pest Solutions will not be around for too much longer unless a drastic change in company culture and operations is made. Their negative reviews far exceed their positive reviews, and negative perceptions tend to linger. Not to mention that once someone reports illegal pesticide applications to the Environmental Protection Agency they run the risk of losing their license to operate in whatever state they violated the law in. They may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, but they can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Find yourself a local, REPUTABLE pest professional and stay away from larger companies like Insight.