The latest news from GuildQuality.

Popular Science’s “Most Innovative Product of the Year” in Home Technology is the Bostitch HurriQuake Nail. In addition to an impressive camel-cased “Q”, the HurriQuake boasts the “perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods.”

Other award winners include a steam washing machine by LG, a personal wind power device, and Stanley’s boldly named “Fubar” hammer.

The GuildQuality lab has been busy over the past couple months. Here’s a quick summary of what they’ve been working on.

New Features: Scorecard, Multiple Users, and Enhanced Peer Settings
Last week, we finished building several big service enhancements. They include the GuildQuality Scorecard (to give you an executive-level summary of company performance), Multiple Users per Account (so everyone in your company can have their own GQ account), and Enhanced Peer Group Settings (that include price point and more specific product type descriptions). We’ll go live with these enhancements on Sunday. To see more details, check out the brief descriptions in our new GQ Blog.

Live Demonstrations of New Functionality
We have three webcasts scheduled for next week, during which Rob Faraj and Geoff Graham will give a tour of the brand new stuff. Please let us know in advance if you’d like to attend, and we’ll send you an invitation.

Tuesday, November 14 at 10:00 AM EST
Wednesday, November 15 at Noon EST
Thursday, November 16 at 2:00 PM EST
ADDED: Monday, November 20 at 10:00 AM EST
ADDED: Tuesday, November 21 at Noon EST

The New GuildQuality Website and Blog
We also launched the new and improved GuildQuality website. With the new website comes the GuildQuality Blog – an ever expanding resource of feature descriptions, member news, and relevant articles on the building industry or customer satisfaction. If you come across anything you think our members would find relevant, including big news about your company, please send it to me, as I update the blog regularly.

Thanks very much for being a part of our community of quality-minded building professionals. We’re excited to be helping you in your ongoing pursuit of excellence.

Every GuildQuality Member may have as many account users as they need. There are three different kinds of users:

Super. This is the account owner. They have super privileges and can do everything, including delete any other user.

Admin. This is an account administrator. These users can do everything a Super can do, except modify the Super’s settings or create additional users. Because this user can create surveys and edit customer information, this is the kind of user a person should be if they are GuildQuality’s point person in charge of facilitating customer surveying.

Normal. This is a read-only account that may (at the discretion of its creator) have limited access to some data. When creating a Normal account, the creator can decide how much access to give this person — whether they should be able to see all survey response information, or only that which is relevant to them.

The User settings are located in Account Settings and are, of course, only accessible to Super and Admin users.

Two GQ features put the “Guild” in GuildQuality. Peer Groups and your Company Descriptions work together to share aggregate member information in a way that provides for relevant performance benchmarking, but does not disclose the identity of any single member.

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The Scorecard gives you a single score from 0% to 100% for every area of your company’s performance — whether as broad as your company’s overall performance for all time, or as specific as a single employee’s performance in a single area for a single quarter. This provides managers with an excellent tool to quickly filter through all the white noise of your thousands of data points, and hone in on exactly what you need to know.

Your “score” equals the percentage of all survey responses to your 0 to 4 questions that were either a 3 or a 4. So in the example above, 50% of all answers in At Contract surveys were 3 or 4. For Shortly After Closing it was 78%, and for Long After Closing it was 71%. Generally speaking, this means that people were most pleased with their experience right after moving in. But this is just one example of how the Scorecard can work.
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MarketWatch has a nice description of prevailing trends among Generation X buyers and insight into the perspectives of the emerging Generation Y market.

Many [Gen Xers are] forgoing master suites and separate wings for kids and adults and instead seeking smaller footprints with space designed for family usage rather than individual usage, Chung said.

The market has yet to catch up with their particular demands, he said. “What we’re seeing is a fundamental mismatch between what these buyers are wanting and what the market is offering. They’re settling for what’s available vs. finding what they really want.”

Other predictions/trends include more compact living quarters in urban areas “where they can interact with their neighbors” and more “solo dwellers”.

Here in the city of Atlanta, we’ve enjoyed a nice spike in our intown population thanks in no small part to these emerging buyer preferences and the foresight of a handful of prescient developers. And even in the face of a market downturn, at least one of our significant urban infill developers remains bullish about prospects for the city’s near-term growth.

We have a lot of inventory out there, sales cycles are stretching out, and buyers are enjoying a sudden decline in new home prices. It is a good time to be known as an accomplished building professional with a history of exceptional service.

It’s an especially good time to be on solid footing, considering that some economist are forecasting some pretty serious doom and gloom. My father forwarded me an interesting article from Fortune this morning, highlighting yet another reason to turn your attention to your company’s reputation. If Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab & Co., is correct, the economy is in for a tough ride next year (see her chart to the right).

A couple excerpts from the article:

“The historical record is extremely negative in terms of what comes next,” says economist Ed Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. “We’ve had 11 sharp declines in the housing market since World War II, including this one. Eight of the last ten were followed by a recession.”

Bruce Karatz, KB’s CEO, thinks it will be next summer at the earliest before homebuilders work through all existing inventory. In the meantime, he’s hopeful that a big upswing in free cash flow - builders have essentially stopped buying new land - will get companies like KB back into Wall Street’s good graces.

Author and journalist James Surowiecki wrote a brief article on historical home prices, in which he asserts that the much-lauded trend of appreciation is the product of bad data analysis.

[I]f you control for inflation and quality…real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties.

Surowieki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a fantastic treatise on “why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations.”

GuildQuality enjoyed a prominent feature in July’s Remodeling Magazine, along with long-time members Classic Remodeling and Strite Design + Remodel. The article is a nice summary of why one should survey their customers, and how one should go about it.

“There is no greater indicator of your future success than your recommendation rate. This applies whether you build three high-end custom homes or 7,000 multifamily condominiums or do $1 million in remodeling.”

Congratulations to Austin Foster and the entire team at Construction Ahead for their excellent cover article in the September Professional Remodeler. The article discusses CA’s growth strategy, customer service philosophy, and how they use GuildQuality.

“I want everybody happy with my work. And you just try to push your guys to understand that and make sure they have that same mentality.”

Austin — thanks for the great mentions of GQ in your piece, and congratulations on the fantastic accomplishments of Construction Ahead in the last couple years.