Members in Oregon
A couple of months ago, a developer member in Oregon invited us to visit their community under development in Bend. We finally took them up on the offer, and spent the early part of this week in Bend and Portland.
Brooks Resources is pretty far along with NorthWest Crossing in Bend — it’s an impressive and well-executed traditional neighborhood development. After touring the community, we participated in a meeting with about forty of their homebuilders, salespeople, and marketing folks. Heather Fricke and I gave a brief talk on customer satisfaction’s impact on sales and marketing within a community, and then introduced their sales and building team to the customer satisfaction surveying program that we’re rolling out at NorthWest Crossing. We had a great time, and are appreciative of all the hospitality we experienced in Bend. Special thanks to David and Romy for your gracious introduction to a beautiful part of the country.
From Bend, we rolled on to Portland for a few sales calls and a (mini) member meeting. Two of our Portland members joined us for supper at a new restaurant downtown. I don’t have all that much opportunity to spend quality face-time with our members outside Atlanta, Charlotte or Charleston, so I really enjoyed breaking bread with Jenny Cowdin of Equity Quest Homes and Mick McGuire and Joe Bauschelt of Intex Custom Homes.
I especially enjoyed hearing first-hand how our members are using GuildQuality’s customer satisfaction surveying and performance reporting. They were also a great sounding board for our upcoming service enhancement plans. Thanks Jenny, Mick, and Joe for coming out.
As exhausting as these trips are, it is great for me to receive the strong affirmation of the strength of our offering. All told, we may have spoken with over 20 building companies during our brief time in Oregon. I took away this message: regardless of whether they build 5 homes a year, develop hundreds of lots, or remodel 1,000 homes, service excellence is critical to their success and something they are all passionate about. The leaders in our industry are laser focused on delivering an exceptional customer experience — in part because they know that satisfied homeowners bring them greater success, but also because they take their job seriously.
Builders, developers and remodelers are shaping the world in which we live and dramatically impacting the lives of their customers. The fine folks we met in Portland take that responsibility seriously.