Quality-minded builders, remodelers, developers and contractors rely on our customer satisfaction surveying to help them provide exceptional service

Late last week, we went live with some significant expansions to the Qlist — our directory of quality-minded building and real estate professionals. As part of our mission to elevate the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance, we take great pleasure in celebrating and promoting our community of quality.

The Qlist is one of the ways we do that celebrating and promoting. Since we launched it in late 2006, it has quickly become the most frequently visited part of our website, and the significant majority of that traffic comes from consumers interested in finding the right builder, remodeler, or contractor.

Here’s a quick run-down of the recent enhancements:

First, we refined the member profiles themselves — both to make make them more attractive, and to accommodate the inclusion of project listings (see below). Here’s a snapshot of a Profile with lots of content (click here to see a sample profile).

Second, we introduced Listings. Listings enable members to show off their homes for sale and/or examples of their work. Every member gets one Listing at no charge, and there are additional nominal fees for including multiple Listings. You can read all the details in the Qlist section of your account “Preferences”. Here’s is an example of a Home for Sale (click here to see a sample listing).

And the last major change: welcome Canada! We’ve been providing customer satisfaction surveying for a number of Canadian companies for some time. Now our map reflects it. As of this writing, just one Canadian member has “opted-in” so far, and I hope more will do so once they read this news.

People have asked, “What influences the default sort order of members in the Qlist?” We wanted the Qlist to “reward” members with more prominent placement as they include more information in their profiles. So the more content you provide (i.e. Logos, Affiliations, Company Description, Customer Comments, etc) the more likely you are to show up near the top of the list. We expect that Listings and the photos in each listing will be especially interesting to the thousands of consumers that visit the Qlist, so their inclusion in your profile gets you an extra bump up as well.

Creating Listings within your Profile is easy. But if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us.

The following post is courtesy of the Remodelers Advantage PowerTips newsletter. RA is hosting two day Sales Workshop (“Building and Managing a Winning Sales Team”) on November 20 and 21 in the Baltimore area. To find out more, click here.

Cooking Up Sales

Here’s a fun and easy way to do some soft-sell marketing: Host a dinner for clients and prospects – and let the clients do the talking (and selling) for you.

For the past 4 years, the folks at Thompson Remodeling, Inc., in Grand Rapids, Mich., have been hosting monthly dinners in their well-equipped kitchen showroom. They hire a husband-and-wife team of chefs whom they’ve known for 15 years and spend a couple hundred dollars to have the chefs prepare a sumptuous dinner for a couple of past clients, a couple of current clients, and a pair of prospects.

“During dinner, we don’t talk about business at all,” says Ben Thompson, general manager of the design/build remodeling firm. “We talk about hobbies, favorite meals and recipes, and everyone’s families. The past and current clients say nice things about us to the prospects. We sit back, keep our mouths shut, and we get sales.”

Lately, Thompson’s financial planner has been hosting dinners at the showroom. “It works pretty much the same way as our company-hosted dinners do,” says the remodeler, “except the planner pays for the meal and it’s his past, current, and prospective clients who join us in the kitchen. I’m there, too, and I put in a good word for him because he’s done great work for me. We sometimes get sales from those dinners, too.”

The client cuisine nights are becoming legendary. Recently, Thompson’s CPA called him up and told him he’d like to host a dinner, too. The remodeler is all for it. “It’s a phenomenal way to connect with people,” he says. “We’re providing a service for businesses we believe in and we get to spend time with people who might be potential clients for our company.”

Looking for other ways to improve your sales team? Building and Managing A Winning Sales Team PowerMeeting has the answers. This 2-day meeting in Baltimore, MD will put you on track to have hard hitting, high performing players on your team.

GuildQuality and BuildTopia are hosting a Member Meeting at the Ecco Restaurant in Midtown Atlanta. We hope that you can join us on November 12, 2008 at 6:30pm for heavy appetizers and cocktails.

Geoff Graham will be sharing information about GuildQuality’s latest happenings, along with our plans for the near future. We are especially interested in hearing your feedback about GuildQuality, our services, and how we can better serve you.

Please RSVP by November 7th. Also, we’d like to keep the event reasonably intimate, so we encourage you to bring up to three additional people from your company. Thanks for being a part of our community of quality-minded builders, remodelers, and real estate developers. We hope to see you very soon.

The AJC reports on Home Depot’s renewed focus on the customer experience, and the efforts of new EVP Marvin Ellison to get the retailing giant “back on track.” According to an analyst quoted in the article, it seems to be working.

For the second quarter, Home Depot reported that its “net promoter scores” had increased. This is the number of customers who felt they had a very positive shopping experience, minus the number of customers who had a negative one. Home Depot gets this number through customer surveys. In the second quarter, that number was up by nearly 5 percentage points.

To all those that have responded to our “State of the Market Survey” so far, THANKS! More than 100 of you have offered your thoughts (quantitative responses along with hundreds of generous comments) on the current state of the market, your forecasts for the next six months, what you see as emerging and waning trends, and what you are doing to navigate the rough waters.

I’ll keep the survey open for a few more days before compiling all the results into a meaningful report, but I thought I’d post a brief preview of some of the feedback…

UPDATE: You can see more about this report here.

UPDATE: Apply now for the 2009 Guildmaster Awards. Members should submit their application by logging into their account and clicking on the link on their dashboard. Non-members should fill out this application. See past Guildmaster Award and read more about the awards here.

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We’ve been producing our Guildmaster Awards more or less the same way since we launched GuildQuality’s reporting system about five years ago. Well, we are bigger now than we were then, and judging from our experience with it last year, it is time for a change.

Streamlining the application process. For our 2009 Awards, rather than considering EVERY Guildmember, we’re considering only those who opt-in to consideration and agree to all the terms and conditions up-front.

If you are a Guildmaster from 2008, you may recall that it took us some time to finalize the awards and get the word out. A significant bottleneck for us was in running down consent forms and signoff sheets. With our new “Call For Entries” process, we’ll get all the signoffs BEFORE we start the evaluation. This will cut down on the number of companies we have to scrutinize (theoretically), and it will absolutely reduce the amount of calls, letters, faxes, that have to go back and forth between GuildQuality and our members.

With the new process, we expect to announce and begin promoting award winners by the end of February. If you are interested in being considered for a 2009 Guildmaster Award, keep an eye out for the Call for Entries form! We’ll post one within your account in the next few days, and send out a few email reminders about it between then and the end of the year.

Expanding the Awards. We have a second big change coming to the 2009 Guildmaster Awards: non-members will be able to apply. As always, members won’t be subject to additional fees for awards consideration, but there will be application fees involved for non-members.

In about a week, we’ll introduce a significant upgrade to our Qlist — our directory of members and their profiles.

Our mission is to elevate the stature of the building and real estate profession to a level commensurate with its importance, and our Qlist plays a nice role in our efforts. Through our service, we help companies enhance the quality of their service, and the Qlist helps us to promote their membership in our community of quality.

Thousands of consumers visit the Qlist on a regular basis to learn more about companies they are considering. Whether they are buying a home or choosing a contractor for a remodeling project, a roof replacement, or a custom built home, the Qlist offers consumers another perspective on our members.

As an example, here is the most visited member profile of the last 30 days, and here are some tips for how to take advantage of the Qlist to celebrate your own business’ commitment to quality.

Next week, we’re introducing Listings into each of our members’ profiles. So very soon, we’ll not only be promoting their companies, but also their work. Members will be able to post homes for sale as well as examples of their work, complete with descriptions, maps, and plenty of photos.

And one more addition: By popular demand, the Qlist will also include profiles for our Canadian members.

Nina Patel of Remodeling has a nice piece on deconstruction in remodeling. I first became aware of the practice when visiting with Melton Construction in Boulder, CO. Another member, Talmadge Construction, is prominently featured in this article.

As dumping costs rise, deconstruction has become more and more economically prudent — not to mention the obvious environmental benefits: reduce, re-use, recycle. The article offers some great advice for remodelers interested in the process.

This AJC describes Robert Charles Lesser’s assessment of Gen Y buyer preferences. The article in a nutshell:

Many in Gen Y have little interest in the lawn mowing, cul de sac life that’s characteristic of so much of Atlanta. At least for now.

Instead, Gen Y wants high-tech convenience and communication, walkability, green building standards and diversity. They’ll sacrifice space, and some will even pay more, to incorporate those qualities into their lives, real estate experts say.

That’s good news for infill redevelopment efforts. “Intown areas and inner suburbs will really remain on an upward trajectory” when the housing market turns around, said Sarah Kirsch, senior principal at Robert Charles Lesser.

Many others have observed similar trends among Gen X buyers and empty nesters. A couple examples here and here.

An afterthought from my previous post:

Among those GuildQuality members that have been with us for more than 2 years, a heartening 47% have had more customers in the most recent 12 months than in the 12 months period prior.

My guess is reviewing revenue numbers rather than number of customers would show a much lower percentage of growth companies (we don’t yet track that info in a normalized format).

Unfortunately, even some of the building and real estate companies that rely on GuildQuality have not been able to carry forward in this challenging market. We know of 12 members that have filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

Of course, when I hear that kind of sad news from one of our members, the first thing I do is check out their account. I noticed enough unhappiness among customers of businesses that are shutting their doors, that I did a little number crunching. I quickly learned that, as a group, they earned the recommendation of their customers 83.3% of the time.

83% is considerably below average for our Guildmembers, so it got me thinking a good bit more. I asked David on our engineering team to pull me all data for all of our members who 1) have been with us for at least two years, and 2) have surveyed at least 15 customers in each of those two years (to get some meaningful data). Here’s what I found:

If you had more customers in the most recent 12 months than you did in the prior 12 months (I called that “Positive Growth” in the chart above), you were among our top performers with a 94% recommendation rate. If you had fewer customers in the most recent 12 months relative to the prior 12 months (“Negative Growth”), your recommendation rate was 4 points lower.

Some other observations:

90% of “positive growth” members have a recommendation rate above 85%

82% of “negative growth” members have a recommendation rate above 85%

42% of members that filed for bankruptcy had a recommendation rate above 85%

If you have a recommendation rate below 85%, you are 6.2x more likely to close your doors than if your recommendation rate is above 85%.

One of the points I try to reiterate in my presentations is that your reputation is your greatest asset. It earns you premium pricing when the market is strong, and it’s your warm blanket when times are tough. Our data clearly supports that assertion.

GuildQuality works with a number of franchises. In many ways, our relationship with a franchise is similar to our relationships with community developers and their homebuilders. We provide the franchisees with the information they need to continuously improve their customers’ experience. The entire franchise community benefits because the strength of the franchise brand improves along with the improvements in the quality of each franchisees customer service. And as with community developers and their builders, we can bring those franchises some special benefits with regard to awards programs and peer comparisons.

This morning I came across an early 2007 interview with four of the leading franchises in the remodeling business. As it happens, two of the four work with GuildQuality (Case Design/Remodeling and DreamMaker Bath & Kitchen).

From Charles Koch’s The Science of Success:

“The key is to recognize when you are experimenting, and limit the bet accordingly.”

A friend works with Georgia Pacific, which in 2005 was acquired by Koch Industries. In my response to a question about “what things are like” working in a company guided by Koch’s business philosophy. Here’s what he had to say:

There is a palpable sense of leadership looking to advance a belief in entrepreneurship among employees – drilled down to all levels of employment so that people look at their jobs and try to find the most effective ways to perform and can be compensated as such. Not a usual tact for other companies.

I have admired Koch for some time, and am excited to be diving into this book. You can see a little more about the man and his Market-Based Management business philosophy here. Thanks to a commenter at Marginal Revolution for pointing out the aforementioned quote.