The latest news from GuildQuality.

The Monday, October 30, Wall Street Journal has a special leadership section [subscription required] focusing on customer service.

The section included about a half-dozen articles covering everything from best practices in the restaurant business to the correlation between satisfaction and pricing. I was pleased to see that virtually every article referenced the critical importance of measuring performance. If you’re a building professional, and you only have time for one, check out Beyond Satisfaction [subscription required]. From the article:

“Pulte’s repeat and referral business [has grown] to 45% of the company’s revenue from 20% in 2001.”
“There is no department in [JetBlue] called ‘customer service’…because every person and every department should embody the term.”

A few other tidbits from elsewhere in the section:

“Keeping realistic promises is more important than providing higher-level service.”
“…highly satisfied [Starbucks] customers spent 9% more than those who were simply satisfied.”
“A good employee or sales associate might be worth five or ten times an average one.”

We’ve not released any major enhancements for our members since April of this year. The guys in the GQ Lab have been focused on some long-overdue internal operations. Well that is about to change. In the second week of November, GuildQuality will roll out three enhancements to the reporting system.

1) The Scorecard. One performance number. Look at a sky-high view, and easily see where your shining stars or weak links are.

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Congratulations to Bob Fleming and all his folks at Classic Remodeling on the completion of their new headquarters in Charleston, SC. Bob is among the small handful of Charleston-based building professionals that beta-tested GuildQuality before we launched our service. I distinctly recall pitching the idea for our service to him in his warehouse way back in 2002.

Survey response rate varies dramatically from member to member, but at present we average a little over 70% for all of our surveying for all of our members.

Many of our members enjoy response rates above 90% response rate, very few have below 50%. Why such a big difference from member to member?

1) Good Customer Contact Information. The biggest contributor to a high response rate is the quality of your customer contact information. Wrong numbers and bad emails lead to no response. We lose nearly 10 percentage points on our response rate for lack of good contact information.

2) Customer Satisfaction. Builders and remodelers who have a high recommendation rate have customers who are more eager to talk about their experience. Building professionals that struggle tend to have more non-responsive customers. Many of these non-respondents are simply frustrated. They also recognize that the survey benefits the member more than themselves, so they just don’t respond. This is especially troublesome, because these are precisely the folks you need to hear from in order to improve.

3) Relationships. We have the highest response rates among smaller volume builders and remodelers, where the customer knows the company owner or operator.

One note about the first two points: Good performance in “Communication” correlates strongly with a high Recommendation Rate. If a building professional doesn’t have accurate contact information for their customers, chances are they have trouble communicating with them. Many members can make dramatic gains in enhancing the quality of customer experience they deliver by simply verifying contact information for they customers.

The NYTimes has a nice piece touching on women’s influence on the home purchasing decision and their insight about what makes for a great home. I built my first spec home with no bath tub in the master bath. Thankfully, several women (one of whom is now my wife) talked me into shifting gears mid-way through the construction process. If they hadn’t persuaded me, I think that house would still be on the market. From the article:

“Shane Homes had the revolutionary idea of asking women what they wanted in a home,” said Joanne Thomas Yaccato, a Toronto consultant and author who advised the company on female consumers. “The revolutionary part is that they not only listened, they actually built the darn thing.”

What else must a home have? The article mentioned a backyard view from the kitchen and a mudroom separate from the laundry. The house next to us keeps dropping its price, despite a fantastic location and nice finishes. Why? An upstairs master with the kids’ rooms on the main floor. “No way could I live there,” says my wife.

The WSJ reports [subscription required] that U.S. newspaper circulation fell 2.8% over the last six months. So where are those readers going? If they’re anything like me, they’ve abandoned print media in favor of the web, a behavior change facilitated in part by RSS feeds (that’s short for Really Simple Syndication) and services like Google’s Customized Homepage. RSS brings all of your news sources directly to you without you having to go out and search for them.

In addition to serving up news from conventional sources like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, Google also retrieves feeds from my selected blogs (Fast Company, Engadget, etc). In fact, it was the ease of access to these blog updates that prompted us here at GuildQuality to replace our newsletters, tutorials, and press releases with a blog format. It’s easy for us to edit and (more importantly) easy for readers to access.So now that we have tweaked our information presentation methodology, I thought it helpful to share with you some other ways to access it. You clearly don’t need Google to access our blog, but a customized homepage (yahoo has one as well) will serve up the latest updates from whatever news sources you choose without you having to go out and find them.

If you are interested in a little more detail about RSS feeds, check out the BBC’s concise tutorial. But trust me, Google makes it idiot proof (even I could do it!). Just go to www.google.com/ig and it will walk you through setting up your own customized homepage.

A Scenario is a set of surveys for a specific type of customer.

For your remodeling customers, you might use “At Contract” and “Shortly After Completion” surveys that are tailored to the remodeling process, but stick with GuildQuality’s standard “Long After Completion” survey. Those three surveys together would make up your “Remodeling” scenario. GuildQuality knows to survey all customers assigned that scenario with the appropriate survey at the appropriate milestone.

You may also have spec home customers, and only want to survey those folks twice: Shortly After Completion with a customized survey that explores the sales and construction process, and then Long After Completion with a standard GQ survey. This would be your second scenario, and you might name it “Spec Homes”.

My favorite thing about Scenarios is that, despite being incredibly flexible, they don’t force you to sacrifice the standardization that enables benchmarking both within your company and against your peers. If you ask the “Communication” question in all of your different surveys, GuildQuality lets you view performance in Communication for responses from a specific survey, all responses for a single scenario, or every single one of your responses regardless of the scenario. And, as with all GQ reporting, you may benchmark those responses against Communication feedback for your peers, regardless of how they’ve customized their surveys or scenarios.

Your Scenario settings live in the Survey Admin chapter of your account. Before setting up a scenario (which is the set of surveys a particular customer will receive), you may need to create the surveys you’ll want to use.

Many of our members use the standard “GuildQuality Classic” survey for all of their customers. This is the survey GQ used when we didn’t offer customized surveying — it is straightforward and works for pretty much all types of building companies. It’s also the survey that will be automaticaly queued up if you never customize a survey. But, if you’d like to customize your surveys, or survey customers at multiple times throughout the building process, you’ll need to create your own surveys.

Creating a survey may sound daunting, but we’ve invested a lot in simplifying the process for you. For one thing, we don’t count on you to come up with your questions from scratch (though you can if you like). Instead, we’ve built a great catalog of questions for you. The question catalog facilitates the survey creation process and preserves your ability to benchmark your feedback against your peers.

To start creating a survey, log into your account, and click on the Survey Admin chapter. The “add a new survey” drop down menu will be in the upper right-hand corner. Select which kind of survey you’d like to create (At Contract, Mid Way Through the Construction Process, Shortly After Completion, or Long After Completion).

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GuildQuality offers some fantastic reports and notifications to help you monitor the quality of service you’re delivering. But oftentimes you just want to see all of your survey responses in a single place. We strive to make all of our reports pretty straightforward, and I am pleased to say that the Responses page is among the most succinct.

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Thanks to all the folks that stopped by our booth at the 2006 Remodeling Show in Chicago. Five members of the GQ family were there.

Thanks especially to Bob Fleming and Dave Bryan (of Classic Remodeling and Blackdog, respectively) for their kind words in their presentations. It is great to hear of our members leading discussions, and especially great to hear of them speaking so positively about our service.

Erin Rosintoski was kind enough to post a few pictures from the event.

We’ll be attending two additional shows in the near future:

SunBelt Builders Show (Dallas, November 16 to 18)
International Builders Show (Orlando, February 7 to 10)

Let us know if you plan to attend either — we’d enjoy seeing you. Also, we’ll be hosting a breakfast in Dallas on November 17. Please contact us if you’d like to attend.

It’s hard to describe the typical Guildmember. Several hundred diverse building companies are a part of our community of quality. Some of our members build as few as 2 or 3 homes per year. Some build several thousand homes on the East coast. Some build several thousand homes on the West coast. Many are remodelers. Some are commercial contractors. And a number of them build everything from $5 million custom homes to convenience stores.

But more important than their differences are their commonalities: They all understand that their reputation is their most valuable asset. They all share a passion for delivering an exceptional customer experience. They are all striving to elevate the building profession to a stature commensurate with its importance in our community.

If this sounds like you, and you’d like to find out more about GuildQuality, please let us know. If you are interested in becoming a part of our community of quality-minded builders, remodelers, and real estate developers, we’d like to give you a complete understanding of our offering before you commit to joining. With that in mind, we offer a free trial of our service to any qualified building professional.

The GuildQuality reporting system should be able to handle the significant majority of your reporting needs, but you’ll occasionally need to analyze your feedback in ways our system doesn’t accommodate. That’s where our export feature comes in.

For all of the numbers jockeys out there who want to dump their data into an MS Excel spreadsheet, simply go to “Responses” in the “Customer Feedback” section and you should notice the export feature near the top of the page.

Also, if at some point in the future you think you might no longer need GQ (and of course we hope that never happens), you don’t need to worry about losing your data. Simply export it before you cancel your membership.

A couple things to note about this feature:

1) You will export whatever survey responses you have selected in the “Customize Report” settings (shown to the right of the image above). So if you are showing all of your responses, you will export a file with all of your responses. But if you are viewing only the previous 12 months of responses, that’s all you’ll get.

2) The export feature is only available to Super Users and Admin Users. So if you are a Normal User, you won’t see this functionality on the Responses page.