GuildQuality

I have been seeing a bunch of GQ logos in our members’ advertisements (and on their websites, too!). That’s fantastic.

Occasionally, I have the presence of mind to capture the moment with my camera phone. Here’s one from an advertisement for Structures Building Company in Charleston Home Magazine.

If you’re using GuildQuality in your advertisements, marketing materials, business cards or wherever, please let us know about it!

Fred Reichheld, author of two seminal works on customer satisfaction surveying and the correlation between service excellence and profitability (the shorter one: The One Number You Need to Grow; the longer one: The Ultimate Question), has a great blog about Net Promoter Scores, Surveying, and Customer Satisfaction.

This morning, I came across a discussion on survey response rates. Since our inception five years ago, we’ve promoted the need to achieve a high response rate. My logic (and this came from my days as a homebuilder and developer rather than any experience as a statistician) was that if you could get feedback from just about every customer, you could use it to tangibly and immediately improve the experience of every one of those respondents. We called that actionable feedback. A 20% response rate meant that you had no actionable feedback from 80% of your customers.

Also, from our personal experiences as respondents and surveyors, we knew that unhappy customers were less likely to respond to a mail or email survey than were happy ones. That meant low survey response rates were the equivalent of rose-colored glasses.

I’ve been very pleased to see the increased awareness and successful implementation of Fred Reichheld’s strategies, as it reaffirms a great deal of our underlying surveying and information reporting philosophy: A high response rate is important; Real-time feedback is critical; Information must get in front of all the right people; and GuildQuality must report it a manner that makes it easy to understand how well the business and its various employees/teams/divisions are performing.

With regard to survey response rates, Reichheld writes

[Though I would have once suggested that] response rates between 30% and 60% seem like a reasonable goal for a well-designed relationship survey. Now, I am convinced that these targets (which many consider radically aggressive) are actually far too low.

We go to great lengths to create a positive surveying experience for our members’ customers. Our philosophy is that we’d like to survey our customers in the way we’d like to be surveyed. So we give them lots of options to respond (email, phone, and survey mailers), and our telephone surveyors are super-nice people that work out of our Eatonton, GA office. Their primary goal is to positively represent our members.

That strategy is working for us and our members. While we aren’t yet at a 90% average response rate for everyone (Reichheld suggests that number as a great target), many of our members enjoy response rates well above 90%, very few are below 50%, and our overall average is slightly better than 70%.

You may have noticed some changes on our website. Two weeks ago, we went live with our latest redesign; an attempt to consolidate our messaging, simplify our navigation and yes… add a little bit of sparkle.

In the previous redesign (left top), we went for a simpler look; one that made access to relevent information easy.

In this redesign, we aimed at further simplifying the navigation and the messaging. We decided to consolidate all of our messaging and remove the “I am a…” aspect of the navigation. This dramatically simplified things. We also wanted to give our website a little more “umph”; that is to say, “umph” without sacrificing simplicity. Whenever we embark upon new functionality in our Customer Satisfaction applications, we expend a generous amount of time talking about how our users spend their time with us. In this case, it was no different. We added a little sparkle, but concentrated primarily on simplicity.

Some notable changes were also made to our Qlist and Guildmaster pages. We were after better “balance” on those pages. We moved a few things around, but nothing terribly dramatic as far as layout is concerned.

All in all, we are pleased with the improvements and hope that you all enjoy the changes.

Congratulations to Normandy Builders of Hinsdale, Illinois: Professional Remodeler’s 2007 Remodeler of the Year. The good folks at Professional Remodeler selected Normandy Builders because of their successful execution of a growth rebound strategy. After a 20% decline in sales from 2005 to 2006, the team huddled up and crafted a new growth strategy. They’ve not only made up their lost ground, but they’re on track to outperform their best year ever by nearly 20%.

I was very pleased to read that a key component of Normandy’s strategy involved GuildQuality’s customer satisfaction surveying. They originally came to us seeking to verify that their lost ground was not a product of diminished service. Their 95% recommendation rate from 200 surveys gave them some solid reassurance. But they got a lot more than affirmation from the surveying. Reg Marzec, who co-founded the company in 1979 elaborates:

But it’s not just about whether we’ve got happy customers. It’s also about finding out if we’re doing something wrong and having the chance and the ability to correct what we might be doing wrong. If we have a weak link, we should try to do something about it. And that has been a real side benefit that I never really thought of.

After getting a handle on the strength of their service, and identifying who were among their most passionate customers, Normandy took the extra step to develop a “Referral Rewards Program” that leveraged “the relationship they had developed with hundreds of satisfied past clients over the years.” The referral program contributed to a whopping 25% increase in leads.

According to their Marketing Director, Laurie Camp, their 2007 strategy is “more of a rifle shot approach than a shotgun approach in targeting potential clients. We’ve actually spent less on marketing than in the past, but we’ve increased our marketing effectiveness.”

I’ve just touched on the customer satisfaction components of their successful strategy. Visit Professional Remodeler to read the entire article.

Congratulations again to all the people at Normandy Builders for their well-deserved recognition, and best wishes for an equally successful 2008.

P.S. If you’re interested in more of Normandy Builders’ stats, they publish their summary Customer Report, and link to it from their website.

No, we haven’t started surveying African homeowners (yet). However, one of our own is blazing his trail in Africa. If you look closely, you’ll see a GuildQuality cap atop the head of Mike Smith on a recent excursion from his base in Nairobi to Cape Point, South Africa.

Mike was the first engineer employed by GuildQuality. Prior to his hire, we outsourced everything. About two years ago, he got an employment offer he couldn’t refuse and he’s now leading a development team in Kenya.

This is Mike on one of his many African adventures. For more action photos of him writing code and wrestling cheetahs (for real), click on his picture.

In the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning, the GuildQuality Member Services team- Laura Flowerree, Jon Atteberry, and Erin Rosintoski- were poised ready to put months (or in some cases weeks) of training and preparation to use for the annual Atlanta Thanksgiving Day Half Marathon.

There had been nary a raindrop in sight for months in Atlanta, and the weatherman had been predicting rain for the holiday morning- but what were the chances of that being true? Unfortunately for us and the other 7,500 or so runners, the weatherman was right. The race began at 7:00 and the heavens opened about 7:02. Cellphones and iPods beware, the rain was showing no signs of slowing. With 13 long miles still to go and the rain pouring down, we thought about the Engineering and Sales teams who were chickens to our challenge of a departmental duel…who were the smart ones now!? But on we ran…

Despite all that nature handed us, we all made it to the finish, wrung out our clothes, and helped ourselves to seconds and thirds at Thanksgiving dinner.

A number of years ago, Bob Vila’s “Home Again” came to I’On to film about a dozen episodes about the construction of a home in the neighborhood.

Click here to watch one of the episodes in which Bob strolls through the neighborhood commenting on the architecture and development philosophy. More about the series of episodes at at Bob Vila’s website.

This series of episodes is especially meaningful to me, as it was at the “wrap party” (the oyster roast that followed the filming of the last episode) where my wife-to-be first considered agreeing to a date.

Congratulations to Suzie and Sean Ellis! On October 25, they added two new additions to their family with the birth of twin Ellii: Ben and McKenzie. I understand from Sean that the very first thing they saw was his GQ-blue jacket!

I have received some great feedback from our members in response to my recent Letter from the Founder. In it, I solicited your constructive commentary about our surveying and reporting systems, and we’ve received some great insights and ideas as a result. Thanks! I thought you might find it interesting to know how we prioritize enhancements to our customer satisfaction surveying and reporting system.

Here’s a screen shot of our current “Enhancements” brainstorm (we use a web-based collaboration tool called “Basecamp” to keep track of all of the various projects we’re working on).

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We’re happy to report that Guildmember Mostad Construction of Missoula, Montana has swept the Missoula Building Industry Association’s annual Parade of Homes. The categories included are Best Decor, Effective Integration, Craftsmanship, Best Kitchen and, finally, the People’s Choice. This is a big accomplishment for Mostad Construction, but is just another drop in the bucket for our decorated Guildmember.

Keep up the great work guys. We are proud to serve and have you in our community of quality-minded builders.

The October 12-18th Special Edition of the Atlanta Business Chronicle featured “The Top 100 Private Companies” in Atlanta based upon reported revenue in 2006. To qualify, these companies had to be headquartered within the 20-county Atlanta metro area and could not be a subsidiary or joint venture partnership. 32% of the final 100 company list are related to the real estate / construction industry. The other major industries making up the other 70% include food (17%), automobiles (8%) and packaging (4%).

We are proud to report that 5 of the Top 100 Private Companies in Atlanta and the surrounding metro area are Guildmembers. They are as follows:

#18 | John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods Inc.
#31 | Bowen Family Homes Inc.
#60 | Sharp Residential LLC
#75 | Peachtree Residential Properties Inc.
#77 | Traton Homes

We would like to congratulate these Guildmembers on their recognition and wish them continued success. We are honored to have you as part of our community of quality-minded builders and are proud to serve you in your quest to deliver an exceptional customer experience every time. Congratulations.

In the last six months, we’ve started hosting some member meetings in various cities around the country: Charleston, Atlanta, Portland, Charlotte, and Dallas so far. These meetings are great opportunities for me to share with our members the story of our growth over the last four years, talk about some of our plans for the near future, thank people for their business, and hear first-hand what you need from GuildQuality.

In the course of these meetings, it’s becoming clear that it will take us a long time to get to every city, so I thought it prudent to send a letter out to everyone. If you have any constructive commentary for GuildQuality, I am eager to hear it.

Membership Growth. Four years ago, fewer than 25 building professionals relied on us for customer satisfaction surveying. Since then, over 500 homebuilders, remodelers, and real estate developers have joined our community of quality. Our membership now includes nationally recognized homebuilders, small-volume custom builders, multi-family developers, and professional remodelers from over 40 states! Despite their differences, they all share a passion for quality. Could there be a greater group to serve? (more…)

The GuildQuality team has spoken, and our newly crowned Garcia Award Winner is Geoff Hartnett, our Director of Web Marketing.

Every member of the GQ team nominates up to three people for the award, and the team member with the most nominations wears the Garcia Mantle until a new winner is chosen. Previous award winners include Laura Summerlin (Survey Manager), Michael Hardy (Data Support Administrator), and Erin Rosintoski (Membership Director).

Hartnett’s takes care of most of our design work, the public website, and virtually all of our marketing. Some of the recent contributions that earned him the team’s accolades: his significant work in enhancing our web presence, his expert production of our communications, and his big help in making the Remodeling Show a great event for us. Hartnett is a big part of the reason why so many people are familiar with our customer satisfaction surveying for quality-minded building professionals.

Congratulations to Geoff Hartnett. Thanks for all your tremendous contributions to GuildQuality.

After October 22nd, when you login to your GuildQuality account you will land on your GuildQuality Dashboard.

The GQ Dashboard is intended to provide a simple, yet meaningful overview of your account. The initial launch consists of 5 modules: “My GuildQuality Feed”, “Quick Links”, “Key Metrics”, “Recent Customer Comments”, and “Last 30 Responses”. Each user has the ability to customize their “GQ Dashboard” to best suit their needs. I’ll explain some of the modules below, but the best way to get familiar with the Dashboard is to start using it.

The “My GuildQuality Feed” module (above) is a real-time chronicle all relevent activity within the member account and the GuildQuality community. The feed provides users with an “up to the minute” view of surveying activity, member forum posts, GuildQuality news, important messages from our Member Services Team, and much more. This is a great way for our members to see what has happened in their account since their last visit.

The “Key Metrics” module, by default, provides a high level summary of your (and your peers’) “Response Rate” and “Recommendation Rate”. The Key Metrics module allows the user to add any, and as many questions as desired. To drill down to performance over the past 30 days, 90 days and 12 months, simply click on the question to reveal the staggered details. Very neat!

The “Recent Customer Comments” module provides a quick and easy way to see the most recent customer comments. Each row contains the customer name, the question name, the date of the comment and, of course, the comment itself. Users can click on the customer name to view the survey results in their entirety. It’s a quick and easy way to see why customers are saying what they’re saying.

In tandem with “Recent Customer Comments”, the “Last 30 Responses” module (left) provides users with a graphical representation of “Scorecard” based scores for the last 30 responses. Like Scorecard, it also shows the average score of the current view. Very quickly, one can see where they’re doing well and where they might be falling short. Is there a peak or valley? Simply click to view the survey results and find out why. This, again, is a very simple and powerful way to view recent performance.

Please email us if you have any questions.

We are very excited about unveiling the “GQ Dashboard” to our community of quality-minded members in the upcoming week. Cheers!

This upcoming week from October 10-12th, GuildQuality will be In Las Vegas at The Remodeling Show held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino. If you’re planning on attending, stop by and see us at booth #4024.

In addition to the show, we’ll also be hosting a breakfast with Remodelers Advantage on Thursday, October 11th from 7:00 to 8:30 at Mandalay Bay’s Red, White and Blue Restaurant. If you’re already a Guildmember, we’d love to see you for a breakfast amongst friends and peers. If you’re not already a Guildmember and you’ve been considering GuildQuality or Remodelers Advantage, come by and see how quality-minded builders nationwide leverage us in their endeavor to be the best building professionals they can be.

If you would like to attend the breakfast, RSVP to Erin Rosintoski or call (404) 961-6124 .

Again, we’ll be at booth #4024. Can’t wait to see you there!