GuildQuality

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?

We are proud of our significant growth, but we still have a long way to go. From the beginning, I have always envisioned GuildQuality as a ubiquitous community of quality-minded building professionals. At present, far fewer than one half of one percent of all building professionals use GuildQuality.

Nevertheless, 500+ is certainly nothing to sneeze at: Our members build or remodel around 30,000 homes annually and control nearly $10 billion in construction spending. Just as significant, our membership earns an overall recommendation rate of 89%–over 25 points higher than the national average.

While these numbers are significant, we are not yet the giant force for quality that I believe we will become. Our mission remains to elevate the building profession to a stature commensurate with its importance. In order to measurably impact our industry’s overall quality, we must continue to grow.

We have had great sales success in environments where our audience is passionate about quality and open to using technology to better their businesses. Individual referrals are excellent, as are invitations to present to groups of building professionals like Remodelers Advantage Roundtables, 20 Clubs, and even informal breakfast clubs. I greatly appreciate all of these introductions. If you are interested in having me present to a group you’re involved with, I would appreciate that opportunity.

A Brief History of our Service Enhancements. In the early days, a handful of Charleston-area building professionals (and one Mobile, AL homebuilder) contributed invaluable feedback to help us launch GQ 1.0. In September of 2003, we launched with a single standardized survey, some basic reporting, and one user per member. Special thanks go to Structures Building Company, Phillip W. Smith General Contractor, Classic Remodeling, Cook Bonner Construction, and Heritage Homes (of Mobile) for their patience and vision during our development period.

About a year after our launch, we took all the feedback we’d received from our members, and outlined a scope for a major upgrade. In September 2005, we introduced our first major enhancement: fully customizable surveys that preserved your ability to benchmark yourself against your peers.

Along with that advancement, we introduced multiple surveys per customer. Instead of surveying each customer with the same survey at the same time shortly after completion, our members could survey multiple times in the customer’s life-cycle with a survey that’s completely relevant to the homeowner.

From 2006 through now, we’ve continued to release regular updates to our customer satisfaction surveying and reporting system. These enhancements reflect our passion for making GQ ever-easier to use and more impactful for your business. Some examples: Multiple users per account (this has been significant for helping our members engage all of their employees in their pursuit of service excellence); Enhancements to user interface and reporting with the introduction of the GQ Scorecard; and most recently Aliasing and Survey Mailers (both of which are designed to improve the experience of your customers–you can read more about those at the website).

We’ve also expanded our scope beyond customer satisfaction surveying. In late 2006, we introduced the GuildQuality Qlist (expanded marketing resources for our members), and in April of this year, we released the GQ Sounding Board (prospect, vendor, broker, and employee surveying).

But there has also been a lot of behind-the-scenes work. This is the kind of stuff that makes your (and our) lives easier, but you don’t ever see it. As an example, we’ve dramatically enhanced our telephone surveyors’ systems and processes. If you’ve been with us for a while, you may have noticed the dramatic jump in the richness of customer comments and the timeliness of survey responses. Unless you visit our Eatonton, GA surveying office (and they would love to have you drop by!), it is hard to appreciate the great work our surveying team does on a daily basis. They are truly a wonderful bunch of people supported by some excellent and ever-improving technology.

In the Enhancement Pipeline. We have several exciting things in the pipeline. Our subscription paying members will begin to enjoy automatically generated survey usage statements in the very near future. After that, we’ll release a completely redesigned dashboard. We feel like the current dashboard (the page you land on when you log in) could be much better, so we’re deep into a redesign to make it far more useful for every kind of user.

Most of these enhancements reflect ideas that our members share with us. Beginning with customized surveying and on up to the recent mail card notifications and aliasing, we’ve endeavored to be responsive to your requests; especially when they will clearly benefit a large number of our members. Thanks for those ideas, and keep them coming.

We have a couple other significant expansions slated for 2008, and as we get closer to a delivery time, I’ll share more with you. These are not “small step” enhancements to our service. Rather, I hope them to be “giant leaps” that add considerable traction to the development of our community of quality-minded building professionals.

Our Team. Many of you may not know much about our team. Overall, our energy is about evenly split among four general areas: Member Services; Sales & Marketing; Engineering, and “Other” (Executive Leadership, Accounting, Office Management). In Atlanta, we’re 12 full-time and two part-time employees, not including the office dog. In San Francisco, we’re one Member Services Representative. In Eatonton, GA, we’re a full-time survey manager and about a dozen part-time surveyors.

Thanks. So, that’s the not-so-brief history of what we’ve been up to over the last four years, where we are right now, and what we’ve got planned for the very near future. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to me should you have any questions or comments. I am appreciative of all the feedback you’re willing to give.

Thanks again for being a part of our community of quality.

Sincerely,

Geoff Graham, President & Founder

P.S. One more thing about referrals: I recognize that people send referrals and make introductions because they value their relationship with us, not because they are seeking reward. Thanks for sending so many prospective Guildmembers our way. To thank our members for their introductions, we introduced a formal “Build The Guild” referral program at the beginning of this year, and have started crediting our referring members an amount equal to a month’s membership fee of the new member. However, I know that we have a lot more referrals than we give credit for. We regularly find out many months after someone joins that they first heard about us from one of our members. If you refer people to us, and would like to receive credit, kindly either let us know you are sending them our way or ask the prospective Guildmember to let us know that you are the reason they called. There’s also a dedicated referral section in your account “preferences”.