Quality-minded home builders, remodelers, developers and contractors rely on our customer satisfaction surveying to help them provide exceptional service

On October 1, we’ll make a significant change to GuildQuality’s “Recommend” question: We’ll change the answer option from “Yes” or “No” to “Zero to Four”.

Please read on to learn about our reasons for making the change and to get some answers to what I believe will be the most common questions.

If you have additional questions about this, feel free to post them in the comments, or contact us directly.
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I spotted this Guildmember’s sign in Ansley Park this morning.

Delivering a beautifully built new home, perfecting a kitchen renovation, or rebuilding the entire exterior of a home is no easy task. So it’s always amazing to me when our wonderful builders, remodelers, contractors, and developers actually deliver the kind of service and craftsmanship that leaves customers thrilled with their work. That they do it with such overwhelming frequency borders on the miraculous.

So here’s my challenge to you all: Don’t squander all that hard work and lose that relationship over something as trivial as a little oversight or a lack of communication. Instead, capitalize on that amazing accomplishment, and enjoy the benefits of a great relationship with each of your customers in perpetuity.

The significant majority of our members survey their customers multiple times, with the last survey occurring at or near the expiration of the warranty period. But what are you missing if you end your surveying with the expiration of the warranty? In the years that follow, your customers will…

1) forget about you;

2) have intended to send your information to their friend after that cocktail party, but forgotten about it, and hadn’t received anything from you that might serve as a reminder;

3) have a problem that you could easily fix, but are just going to suffer it because it’s too much effort to let you know about it and it’s such a little thing. Then little Sally has a birthday party and the parent of one of the guests (who is a homebuilder) points it out, and that conversation turns into a bigger conversation about building that second home at the lake, and your customer builds a second home (or a new kitchen, or a deck, or a carport — you get the idea) but they never spoke with you about it.

And all because you didn’t make it easy for them to stay in touch with you. How can we fix this? Simple:

Let’s modify your default survey scenario to add a few more extremely brief Long After Closing surveys. We’ll ask your clients if they’d still recommend you and if there’s anything you can help them with.

If you’d like some help setting this up, please let us know.

A couple weeks ago, we released the GuildQuality Twitter Client. I have to admit, I’ve probably been paying way too much attention to it, but a ton of our twittering members absolutely love it, so it seems our investment has been worthwhile.

This weekend, we pushed out a little tweak to the auto-tweet feature (or tweet-tweak, if you will) that added the city and state of the commenter into the auto-tweeted comment. After overcoming a tiny glitch, it now seems to be working perfectly again.

We wanted to include the city and state in the tweeted comment, so that the message would appear in local search results. If, as in the example above, someone is searching for what’s going on right now in Navarre, FL, and a comment from one of our members’ customers in Navarre has recently been posted, then folks will see it. That makes it easier for people to keep a finger on what’s happening in their area. Now, your customers’ voices can be a part of that dialog.

If you’re not familiar with Google’s “Updates” search, you can learn more here.

One of the most common enhancement requests we receive is for an easy way to print a high-quality version of the GuildQuality Customer Report. Printing a web page is tricky business, and every browser will do it differently, so coming up with a built-in solution to consistently render HTML on the printed page is a deceptively big project, so we’ve instead been focusing our engineering resources on other things.

However, I completely appreciate that a high-quality printed version of the Customer Report is a great addition to your marketing collateral. With that in mind, I wanted to share how I go about producing high-quality images of webpages. Hopefully you’ll find this useful for your Customer Report and other pages as well. Check out this video for a brief explanation, and if you like this method, download the “Screengrab” plugin for Firefox.

One additional thing I neglected to show in the video: If your customer report is very long, you might want to just print the first page. However, if you’d like to have the footer show up on a printed version, you should shorten your report — either by shortening the period of time displayed in the Customer Report, or by removing some customer comments.

Aug 10 Update: See how we’ve juiced this feature up to help with local search results or check out the most recent comments shared by our members via the GQ Twitter Client.

Before today, you needed to go through a few gyrations to automatically tweet the comments you’ve published on your Customer Report (click here to read more about publishing comments). No more! GuildQuality now offers a seamless integration with your Twitter account. If you use Twitter for your business, check out the video below to see how it’s done.

Log in to your account to get started, or read on for more information.

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In this webinar, GuildQuality shares specific strategies to differentiate your business online using “quality” as the theme.   Stand out from the crowd.

Last week, a remodeler posted a question  to NARI’s LinkedIn Discussion Group, asking her peers for advice about customer satisfaction surveying, and many of our wonderful members chimed in with their opinions. On Friday, I shared that thread in GuildQuality’s own discussion group and that seems to have attracted a few more Guildmember comments.

If you’re a member of NARI, I encourage you to check out the discussion — there’s thoughtful advice from many accomplished remodelers, at least ten of whom are GuildQuality members.

While the question was posted in a remodeling forum, I think it’s relevant to any business who surveys their customers, especially companies in the residential construction and real estate space. Here are my own thoughts in reply to her question — some of which were reiterated by the company owners who chimed in on the discussion:

1) Third-party surveying results in honest feedback. The old joke in customer satisfaction surveying is “If you want people to tell you what you want to hear, ask them yourself. If you want to hear the truth, have someone else ask them.” I am always surprised to learn that some builders and remodelers still hand out a survey at the closing table or the end of the job, watch the client complete it, and then brag about their 99% response rate and 99% recommendation rate. Hint: They are lying to you.

2) Response rate is important. As Fred Reichheld notes, lengthy and low-response-rate market research surveying is an altogether different animal than customer satisfaction surveying. Your surveying process is an extension of your service, so do it in a way that engages your clients rather than alienates them. In addition to keeping surveys succinct and relevant, we also give people lots of options to reply (email, phone, and mail). And so we never lose site of the fundamental requirement that our surveying process support the overall service experience, we give respondents an opportunity to share with us their feedback about completing our surveys. Here’s how we do it and what they have to say.

3) Take immediate action. If you sporadically survey your customers, and if only 35% of them reply, you can’t really rely on surveying to give you an accurate picture of performance, and it definitely won’t help you identify issues that need immediate attention. But if 75% of customers reply, and you survey everyone right after contract, close, near the expiration of their warranty, and on the anniversary of their closing every year thereafter, you’ve got a real system in place to monitor quality. And — even more valuable than the reliable trend reporting — you can count on your surveying to churn up real issues that need attention right then. Thankfully, that attention is just as likely to take the form of a thank you for a kind comment or constructive suggestion as it is to be a follow up to attend to something that’s not done to your standard of quality. And if you regularly survey long after the job is done, that check-in is likely to result in a referral or even more work with the same client. A key, however, is that you MUST take action. That means distributing your feedback to your entire team so that the right people can follow up.

4) Benchmark your performance. Lacking anything but reports about average referral rates among builders and remodelers, you might feel pretty good about an 86% recommendation rate. Not so fast. You want to be comparing yourself against the best in the business — not the average. In this market, only the best companies survive and thrive. You can read evidence of that here and here.

5) Don’t just file the feedback away in a drawer. There are all sorts of things you can do with these wonderful comments, and tracking performance from quarter to quarter or superintendent to superintendent is just the beginning. Nothing influences your prospective clients like the opinions and experiences of your past clients. So get that feedback out there where people can find it — whether that’s in a GuildQuality Customer Report, on Twitter, on Facebook, or wherever.

On July 27, I’ll be speaking with Victoria Downing about how to differentiate yourself based on what you’ve actually accomplished, and rise above everyone else’s superficial chatter. Victoria is an amazing leader in our industry and a wonderful person. She can make even a guy like me sound intelligent, so I encourage you to tune in. Click here to register.

This interview will be available only to members of the Remodelers Advantage Community. If you’re not  yet a member, you should become one now.

Once again, GuildQuality is powering a Service Excellence Award for the Charleston Trident Homebuilders annual PRISM Awards. I believe the significant majority of our Charleston members are also members of the CTHBA — all of you should apply for a Service Excellence Award. The deadline for application is August 10, 2010.

Click here to download the PRISM Awards Application Package

Every member of our small crew pulls a lot of weight. From time to time, I forget the importance of lifting my head up from my own oar, and making sure that everyone’s clear on exactly where we’re rowing. A couple weeks ago, my brother gave me a helpful reminder in the form of a Jim Collins quote:

The number one responsibility of a leader is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.

I spent some time reflecting on that reminder, and shortly thereafter penned a lengthy letter to all of our people here at GuildQuality. After mulling it over for a few days, I thought it appropriate to share those thoughts with all of our Guildmembers and anyone else that has an interest in where GuildQuality is going.

I’ll call out one paragraph from near the end of the letter — mainly because it relates to what GuildQuality is doing right this minute with pictures of our members’ work:

With published feedback from their customers and photographs of their work — thousands of photographs — our members are sharing a powerful statement with those who depend on them for the care and creation of their houses. They are asking people to judge them not by what they say they’ll do, but to judge them by what they’ve done. Judge them by the feedback from hundreds of their customers. Judge them by the examples of their work. And judge them by the company they keep — the best builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers in North America — all of whom are unique, and all of whom share a commitment to quality.

That paragraph, while specifically relevant to our latest site enhancement, shares the theme I intended to convey throughout the letter: That our mission is, was, and will continue to be to elevate the stature of our industry to a level commensurate with its importance.

For those that are interested, here’s the full version of the letter: (more…)

Visitors to GuildQuality’s website can now search the pictures of your work to find inspiration for their next remodeling project, custom home, or new home purchase.

Early this morning, we made it easy for you to tag each of your pictures with descriptive words and phrases to help visitors in their searching. Tags enable us to organize the images so that we can return the right ones when people are searching for some kitchen inspiration or considering building a custom home. Or maybe they’re thinking about a new pool or updating a bathroom.

Also worth noting, the tags you add to your pictures become the images’ alt attributes. These words help search engines understand what the picture is all about. Previously, our images had no alt attributes. With the addition of these tags, GuildQuality’s members’ pictures will begin to turn up in search engine results.

That was the good news. Here’s the bad news: While we “seeded the field” by tagging a bunch of pictures today, there are still more than 1,500 pictures that have yet to be tagged. Tagging yours will only take a few minutes, so click here to go the marketing admin section of your account, and start tagging!

Remember: If you don’t add tags, it will be harder for people to find your pictures.

My thanks go out to all the builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors who participated in our most recent survey. More than 100 of our members offered their predictions about which way things would go for their businesses and the market in general.

Click on the menu button below to view the full screen version. Also, you can find all past member predictions reports here.

On Friday, I signed the last of the 2010 Guildmaster certificates. If you ordered some, and have not yet received them, expect them to arrive in the next couple of day.

Last week, GuildQuality hosted a webinar for our custom home builders, inviting them to learn more about Southern Living’s Custom Builder Program. For those that couldn’t attend, here’s the recorded version.

Southern Living Webinar to GQ Members from GuildQuality on Vimeo.