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

David is putting the final touches on an enhancement to your member profile page and the main GuildQuality home page. The picture above is a snapshot from the updated home page.

The home page will have an aggregate feed of all member activity, and each member’s profile page will show their own company’s activity. If you publish your Customer Report, your personal activity feed will display when you’ve received survey responses (i.e. when the Customer Report is updated with new feedback). If you use Twitter or have a company blog, the activity feed will also display your company’s posts and tweets (refreshed on the hour).

The objective is to help visitors to your profile page get a better understanding of what your company is like, and also help you to broadcast your activity on a larger scale.

We’ll also be adding RSS to each activity feed and your customer report. The Customer Report RSS feed will capture your newly published customer comments. So using that feed in conjunction with a service like TwitterFeed will make it easy for you to auto-post those customer experiences to your Facebook Fan Page or company Twitter account.

Susan Bady, Senior Editor of Custom Builder Magazine, penned an excellent article on Payne & Payne, NAHB’s Custom Builder of 2009. I caught a picture of the award announcement at the Custom Builder Symposium in November, and had the pleasure of spending a good bit of time with most of the Paynes.

Congratulations to Case/Design Remodeling, Professional Remodeler’s 2010 Remodeler of the Year. I’m thrilled to see them earn this type of recognition after the kind of year the industry had in 2009. Case is among a large handful of our members that constantly challenge us to improve the way we do business, and they always initiate those conversations with some thoughtful suggestions that would bring value to both them and our larger membership. A number of the enhancements (both small and large) that we’ve made over the last three years are things that emerged from a conversation with the Case team.

This weekend, we launched the GuildQuality API. The API enables our regular members (association accounts are not yet supported) to re-purpose GuildQuality survey feedback in any format they wish. As an example, you might be interested in displaying your latest GQ stats in your company’s intranet. With the API, you can build a table that displays your up-to-date key metrics or most recent survey responses.

Super Users and Admin Users can access the API via Account Settings in Preferences.

We’ve created the API for a few reasons:

First, we wanted to help you pull your GuildQuality feedback into the other softwares that you use. We firmly believe that the single greatest thing you can do to improve your performance is to communicate your feedback throughout your team. The API will help you get it out of your account and into the hands of the men and women that care for your customers.

Second, we field a TON of requests for customization. Many of those requests are for improvements that would benefit all of our members. When we field those, we add them to our engineering pipeline, and eventually they’ll see the light of day (the API itself is a good example of a member-requested enhancement). But many of those requests are for reports that would be interesting and useful to a small subset of our members. The API gives those members a viable option for taking the ball and running with it themselves.

Lastly, the API opens a number of doors for us. Initially, it will be a one-way-out system. Meaning it will enable you to take data out of the system and re-purpose it as you see fit. Ultimately, we envision expanding the API so that you can also write to your account from other systems — i.e. updates to customer records in Peachtree or Salesforce will update your customer records in GuildQuality. That’s a ways off, but this is a big step in that direction.

The long term goal is, as always, to make it easier for you to use and get value out of your membership in our community of quality.

As the weather in Las Vegas worsened, my confirmed hiker list dwindled, until Abe Degnan of Degnan Design Builders was all that remained.

Rain in Las Vegas turned out to mean snow at Red Rock Canyon, and as challenging as that sounds, it turned out to be wonderful. Click here to see all the pictures from our first annual GuildQuality hike. Abe is responsible for all the good photographs. I took the lousy ones.

We will soon introduce a new and simplified way for our members to promote their membership in our community of quality: GuildQuality badges.

How do the badges work? Members can include a GuildQuality badge in their websites to connect directly to their member profiles. The badges are also dynamic, meaning the image and link changes depending on the marketing preferences you select in your account. For example, if you’ve not been publishing your customer feedback and you decide to make it accessible, the image will change to indicate that people can “View Customer Feedback.” If you’ve been a Guildmember for some time, and finally win a Guildmaster Award, the image will change to reflect that you are an award winner.

Why should you use a badge? Using a badge (en lieu of a simple link to our site or your profile page) will help you in two primary ways. First, our system will magically recognize which members are using their badge, and they’ll be promoted more prominently in our member directory. Second, using the badge will help us to present a consistent image of GuildQuality to the general public, thereby raising awareness of the brand and increasing the value of your membership.

Stay tuned for word about the introduction of GuildQuality badges!

A couple weeks ago, we applied for the Rackspace Fanati Award:

Here at Rackspace, we’ve built a reputation based on service, known to our customers as Fanatical Support®; our anytime, anywhere, any way approach to customer service. And we know we’re not the only ones who put customer needs first. That’s why we created The FANATI in 2007 to recognize one of our customers for valuing customer service as much as we do.

I was thrilled to hear that GuildQuality is among a handful of finalists. To determine the winner, Rackspace is presently surveying a random selection of our members (the irony!), as well as a selection of customers from the other finalists.

Rackspace is one of the companies we emulate for our own customer service, and being a finalist for this award is a big coup for our team.

Jan 6 Update: The meetup will be at 5:30 on January 19 at Tempo in the Las Vegas Hilton. For more details, visit the official meetup page.

On January 19 at 3:30 in South 221, Craig Schweikart (of Constellation Homebuilder Systems) and I are giving a talk entitled “Best Practices for Integrating Technology in Your Business”.

My portion of the session will cover how GuildQuality uses technology in both our operations and marketing. The show’s planners invited me to give the same talk I gave during November’s Custom Builder Symposium (I also gave a similar presentation at a couple of recent NARI events). I’ll be updating it to include some of my more recent finds, so even if you’ve seen it before, I encourage you to join us.

If you have interest in this session, my 1st annual IBS hike, a meetup at 5:30 on the 19th at Tempo (in the Las Vegas Hilton), or just getting together for a cup of coffee, please let me know!

Photo courtesy of ccharmon

I’ll be giving a talk at the IBS on Tuesday, January 19, and then staying in Las Vegas for a couple more days. I hate to say it, but I really can’t stand Las Vegas. The disposability of the place makes me feel sad for both humanity and our planet. So as a respite, I intend to escape Sin City for the afternoon of the 20th.

A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of hiking in Red Rock Canyon, about 30 minutes outside of town. This year, I intend to return. By hiking into the canyons on Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be missing some great stuff at the International Builder Show, but I expect to make it back to the convention center by dinner time. If this sounds tempting, check out these pictures.

If you are attending the show, and would like to get away for a few hours, please sign up here to join me, and I’ll include you in the trip details. If you can’t join me for the hike, but would still like to get together, please let me know and we’ll try to work out a time to circle up.

Since the fourth quarter of 2008, we’ve regularly surveyed our members, asking their opinions about the near term future for both their company and the the construction and real estate industry. (click here to view all past reports)

In each Member Predictions Survey, we ask our members to answer two primary questions:

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in YOUR COMPANY’S PERFORMANCE over the next six months?”

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in THE MARKET over the next six months?”

As in prior quarters, more than 100 of our members participated. This quarter’s feedback (provided between mid-December and this morning) showed the most optimism since we began our “Guildmember Predictions” surveying. What follows are two ways of viewing their feedback, as well as all of the additional comments provided by our homebuilders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors.

Guildmember Confidence Index (GCI)

The Guildmember Confidence Index boils all of the answers down to a single number. We calculate the GCI by subtracting the percentage of members predicting decline from the percentage predicting improvement. Therefore, a positive number means more members predict things will be getting better than worse. The only quarter in which the GCI has been negative (so far) has been Q4 2008.

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As a follow up to our mid-year post on the same subject, here are a list of the 10 most viewed member profiles:

1. Big State Remodeling

2. Carnemark Systems & Design

3. Betenbough Homes

4. Ivey Residential

5. Curb Appeal Renovations

6. Quadrant Homes

7. Conaway Homes

8. Penguin Windows

9. Case Design/Remodeling

10. Structures Building Company

And here are the 10 most-viewed member customer reports:

1. Penguin Windows

2. Heritage Homes

3. Francis Harvey & Sons

4. Thompson Creek

5. Normandy Builders

6. Case Design/Remodeling

7. Jeff Benton Homes

8. Carnemark Systems & Design

9. Curb Appeal Renovations

10. GuildQuality (that’s us!)

11. Westpoint Homes

Following are the top 10 posts of 2009, by pageviews (hat tip to Signal vs Noise):

1. May 6: Member Predictions & Strategies

2. September 30: Call for Entries: 2010 Guildmaster Awards

3. January 27: How did you find out about us?

4. April 20: New Release: GuildQuality & Social Media

5. July 16: Prospect Surveying is Now Available

6. April 21: Coastal Living Idea House in I’On

7. July 1: Guildmember Confidence Climbs in 2nd Quarter

8. February 27: Announcing the 2009 Guildmaster Award Winners

9. February 11: Overhaul of GuildQuality Marketing Resources

10. May 4: Guildmembers Most Viewed in the Qlist Year to Date

On December 3, GuildQuality hosted a webinar to review some of our marketing resources. Here is the recorded video. (33 minutes)

This webinar is for builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject. We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we also discuss prospect surveying.

Each year, Rackspace sponsors a customer service competition. The “Fanati” award is designed to recognized “fanatical” service among the company’s customers. This year’s application required that candidates submit a 5 minute video about their company.

In our video application, you’ll hear three Atlanta-area members describe why they use GuildQuality, what we do for them, and what kind of people make up our team.

Special thanks to Dwayne Hill at Traton Homes, Kelly Rulis at John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods, Dan Weidmann of Weidmann Remodeling, and Alan Stump (the video’s producer).

Way back in 2003, Frank Lott, III of Heritage Homes in Mobile, Alabama signed on with my shiny new company, GuildQuality. Frank is an excellent guy, and one of the members that I sincerely lament isn’t here in Atlanta where I could see him more frequently.

While preparing for a presentation tomorrow, I was spot checking the web presences of a bunch of the home builders, remodelers, developers, and contractors that rely on GuildQuality’s customer satisfaction surveying. When I googled “Heritage Homes, Mobile, AL”, up popped a bunch of Extreme Makeover videos from early 2008.

The Heritage team is filled with wonderful people, and you’ll see that come through in these amazing videos. I encourage you to check them out.

By the way, if you have interesting news to share about your company, don’t hesitate to send it our way. The people that make up our community of quality enjoy reading about our other members.