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

Our friends at Custom Builders USA have offered to conduct a special webinar for GuildQuality members on May 11 from 1-2pm ET.   The speaker will be Bill Smithers (CEO), who will share how the CB/USA network combines the purchasing power of reputable builders to lower costs and increase service levels from suppliers.  CB/USA’s value proposition is well summarized in this short video (2.5 minutes).

We will be joined on the call by Bob Fleming, owner of Classic Remodeling.  Bob is a GuildQuality member and a founding member of CB/USA – Charleston. 

Click here to register for the webinar.

I recently connected with an old friend, who has launched a website called RemodelQA.  The site is intended to connect homeowners, who have questions about remodeling or home improvement projects, with qualified professionals.  While still early days, the company has 39,000 indexed pages in Google.

The company was founded by experts in search engine optimization.  If you search “remodeling questions” in Google, RemodelQA is the second listing.  When you respond to a question and share your expertise, the response creates a unique internet page that exists forever and will be searchable by Google.  So, this is a way to market your expertise and create a permanent “flyer” for your business on the internet.  In some cases, it might also lead to a qualified lead.

RemodelQA is a free service, and they are marketing GuildQuality members on their site.  Click here to sign up, upload your company’s logo, add links to your social media, and become part of RemodelQA’s online Contractor Directory.  Finally, GuildQuality members will be noted with the GQ logo (see below) and you can insert a link to your Customer Report.

Please let us know your feedback as you try out this service.

In January, I previewed the new GuildQuality badges. And as of last night, they are ready for you to add them to your company’s website. Click here to get started.

A few great things about the new GQ badge:

1) It’s smart like a chameleon. If you publish your customer report, it instructs people to “view customer feedback” and links to the report. If you don’t publish the report, the badge instructs people to simply “view member profile”, and directs traffic to your profile page. Also, if you’re not a Guildmaster Award Winner when you add it, but you earn that recognition later, the badge automagically changes to reflect the accolade. And if you ever decide to cancel your membership, the image will mysteriously and unceremoniously disappear from your site.

2) People will recognize it. It’s designed to give a consistent representation of the GuildQuality brand across our entire membership.

3) It plays favorites. The badge communicates with the GQ system and rewards those that use it with higher ranking in our membership directory.

4) It can save you some money and earn you prizes. To celebrate the launch of the new badges, we’re giving a credit of $50 and a koozie to the first 10 members that add it to their site. So forward these instructions to whomever manages your website, and ask them to set you up!

If you are the customer of one of our members who publishes their customer report, then you’ll see this form right after you complete a survey by mail or email. This is also the form you see if you return to your survey response to view it at a later date (six percent of all respondents return to view their response — I suspect most of these are spouses, checking up on how their significant other responded).

We’ve added an “auto-share” option to this form — it helps your customers share your customer report via Facebook or Twitter. If the respondent clicks on Twitter, they go straight to their twitter account with the following pre-loaded “tweet”:

The bit.ly link in the tweet will take people to your customer report.

If the respondent clicks on the Facebook icon, they go straight into their FB account, and your customer report link is pre-loaded into their status box.

This option only appears if you publish your customer report. Our intention is to help your customers share their good experiences with their friends and family. If you don’t know if your customer report is published, search for your company in our member directory. If you’d like to edit your customer report settings, click here.

You can now add your company’s YouTube channel to your member profile (and Vimeo, too). Click here to make that happen.

With just one click, you can now publish the comments you receive in your survey responses directly to your Customer Report. Those newly published comments will also appear in the GuildQuality Stream. Watch this 90 second video to see how its done!

GuildQuality was a finalist for the Rackspace FANATI Award for exceptional customer service. Alas, we didn’t bring home the gold. That honor went to PetRelocation.com. Their video is worth a watch:

These guys love what they do. If ever we need to move our pets, I’m definitely calling them.

Your member profile allows you to publish pictures and descriptions of your work, communities, and homes for sale. We call these “listings”. Previously, we’ve allowed every member to publish one listing for free, and we’ve charged extra for more than 1.

Today, we raised the “free” limit to 10 listings.

So if you haven’t created a Listing, what’s stopping you? Click here to log into your account and be taken directly to the Qlist management page. From there, simply click “Add a New Qlist Listing”, and you’re off to the races. It takes just a couple minutes and is very straightforward.

You’ll notice that our members with listings generally appear higher in the default sort order of the member directory. Amount of content is one of the things that determines the ranking of member profiles. The other two are recency of surveying and whether or not the member uses the GuildQuality badge.

The American College of the Building Arts is dedicated to educating the next generation of building artisans. Students at the college are learning both the craft and the profession of construction.

Visit the college’s site or read this recent Preservation Magazine article, and you’ll quickly see why we’d like to support their mission. In our own ways, we both seek to elevate the stature of the building, remodeling, and real estate development profession.

The college and its students would appreciate your financial support — and they’d also benefit from some inspiration. So here’s my appeal to you:

Please tell us why you have chosen this profession!

If 100 building, remodeling, or real estate development professionals share their story (in the comments here on this post, by replying to @guildquality on twitter, or on our facebook page) before the end of March, we’ll give $500 to the college. So please, give us your answer (no matter how brief), and ask others to do the same.

Note: I’ve reposted some comments that people have provided in other forums. I’ve tried to catch them all, but likely missed some. My apologies if I missed yours!

By clicking on the little orange “Share This” icon in the footer of every page on our website, visitors can easily share the page they’re viewing via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. About 5 times a day, someone uses this little doohicky.

A few months ago, I posted our visitors’ sharing patterns. For those that are interested, here’s an update.

Email remains the leading method of sharing, followed by Facebook, and (assuming you don’t count printing) then Twitter.

Looking at the content shared, GuildQuality-specific pages (blog posts and pages describing our service) make up about 14% of the pages shared, and Member-specific pages (customer reports, Guildmaster interviews, and profiles pages) make up the remaining 86%.

If you aren’t sharing your GuildQuality Customer Report, and you have an interest in doing so, you absolutely should. Our customer reports clearly attract the most attention on our website.

Earlier today, I sent an email out to the super- and admin- users whose surveys allow for anonymous responses. I’m posting that email here for everyone’s reference.

Many of our members allow people to request anonymity in their survey responses. After careful consideration, we’ve elected to entirely remove this option for all new GuildQuality members, and beginning on March 15, we will remove the option for existing members as well.

Before deciding to make this change, we solicited feedback from the members of our GuildQuality LinkedIn discussion group. The overwhelming response was in favor of eliminating the option. Click here to read what they had to say, and to chime in on the conversation.

Every day, GuildQuality receives constructive feedback from people who need help resolving a problem with their home, remodeling project, or apartment. And every day, Guildmembers are using their survey responses to immediately respond to those that need assistance. Presently, many of our members allow people to respond anonymously. As a result, we often receive survey responses wherein the respondent has requested anonymity, but has also described a resolvable problem. And sometimes, an anonymous respondent will even request that a specific problem be resolved. In these instances, it is difficult and often impossible for the Guildmember to follow up and correct a problem. For this reason, we intend to eliminate the anonymous option altogether.

I do not anticipate that this will impact your survey response rate. We compared historic survey response rates among those that allow anonymity versus those that don’t, and found them to be identical. But more importantly, I expect this to increase the utility of the information we provide you, and the quality of service you are able to provide your customers.

Beginning on March 15, GuildQuality will eliminate the ability for survey respondents to request anonymity. When this happens, all prior respondents who requested anonymity will still have it, but future respondents will not be presented with that option.

If you are among our members who allow anonymity, and you prefer that we keep the anonymous question in your surveys, please let us know. Otherwise, you don’t need to do anything, and the anonymous question will disappear from your surveys on March 15.

On Friday, Rackspace informed us that, after becoming an award finalist earlier this year, we did not become the supreme super winner of their coveted FANATI Award. Rackspace has not yet announced the winner, and I hope to have the opportunity to congratulate them when they do.

I understand that Rackspace based their decision on two things:

1) Each candidate’s application video, and

2) The company’s customer satisfaction scores (compiled via Rackspace’s own survey).

Rackspace asked that a random 300 of our members be surveyed. 127 of you graciously responded (even though most of you had already responded to one of GQ’s own member satisfaction surveys).

On Friday, Rackspace shared with us a summary of the survey feedback you provided, and I’m exceedingly pleased to report that we did pretty well. In fact, the Rackspace survey showed us with a Net Promoter Score of a whopping 83.2%. That’s higher than the scores for top performing industry giants like Apple and USAA. It’s also higher than our similarly calculated GuildQuality Index (GQI) of 69% (YTD).

If you are interested in the Net Promoter methodology, you may want to read this brief post from late 2007, or check our Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question.

In this month’s Remodeling Magazine, Ben Morey of Morey Construction and Martha Stinson of Trace Ventures shared how GuildQuality helps them reward and praise excellent service among their teams.

Morey says that perpetuating the client-feedback loop has been one of his “best tools” for maintaining morale and productivity. He shares survey results in meetings, and especially relishes placing printed copies of client comments on employees’ desks.

Thanks Ben and Martha, for sharing!

An interview with Kelly Rulis, Vice President of Customer Satisfaction & Experience for John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods:

Click here to learn more about GuildQuality and our services for homebuilders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers.

For a number of years, GuildQuality has allowed our members to opt-in to our public membership directory. We’re interested in sharing with the world which companies rely on GuildQuality to help them deliver an exceptional customer experience. We believe their membership in our community of quality speaks well of them, and it’s certainly a feather in our cap to be the tie that binds so many exceptional businesses together.

But after a while, a simple list starts to get old. So earlier this week, we introduced the GuildQuality Stream — a feed of all of our members’ published activity. For those Guildmembers who have a public profile, we’re publishing their updates. Those updates include their twitter and blog posts, as well as updates to their GuildQuality listings. And if they’ve published their customer feedback, the updates will include survey response notifications and flagged customer comments.

The result is a stream of interesting activity, updated every hour on the hour. You can view what’s going on all over North America, or zoom all the way in, and look at Charleston only.

While I may be biased, I find it mesmerizing. I am unable to keep from returning to check it out at 2 minutes after each hour.