The latest news from 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.

Congratulations to the team at Renaissance Exteriors for their prominent coverage in the September/October issue of Replacement Contractor.

The cover article discusses the sales and marketing challenges facing the “Replacement 100,” and how those have changed in recent history. Replacement Contractor uses Renaissance Exteriors as the goto contractor for insight into how the largest 100 replacement contractors are jumping those hurdles.

Worth noting: customer satisfaction remains critical to these businesses that are leading the pack. According to a summary of the Replacement 100’s lead sources:

• 94% rely on referrals as a lead source,
• 86% rely on repeat business, and
• 79% rely on their company’s reputation and word of mouth.

Congratulations to the Renaissance Exteriors team for their prominent coverage and tremendous company growth.