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

Calculated Risk is a great blog on economic statistics, with often thought provoking charts and data.

Signal vs Noise remains a staple in my diet.

I recently subscribed to FlowingData — a blog about visualizing information in a useful way (which is a significant part of GuildQuality’s focus).

And for books, I am in the final few pages of Joseph Ellis’ latest work American Creation (and here’s the NYT review). Personally, I preferred his similarly structured Founding Brothers, and his biography of Washington was amazing, inspiring, and gave me a renewed and heightened respect for our amazing first founder.

Black Swan is in its sixth month of sitting on my bedside table. It is great so far, but I have been unable to get through it in the face of the author’s horrible prescience.

My book club (made up of six college buddies) just chose our next book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

UPDATE: You can download a complete summary of all the member feedback by clicking here.

In the previous two weeks, 125 members responded to our survey about their predictions for the market’s next six months and their strategies for overcoming the considerable challenges facing the building industry.

Expectations for the Market. When it comes to the market in general, 46% of members expect the decline to continue, and only 12% expect improvements. Members were considerably more optimistic when it comes to their own companies future, with as many people forecasting a much brighter road ahead as there were people predicting either more of the same or worsening conditions.

We’ll conduct a similar poll in three months, and hopefully see some positive change in these forecasts.

Strategy. Of much more interest were people’s feedback about their strategies for handling our extended stay in the Pit of Dispair. Strategies ranged from prayer to a deepened focus on their relationship with existing and past customers. Almost all of the strategies fell into one of eight categories. The predominant category was aggressive stewardship of resources with a focus on ensuring that the company has the resources to weather the storm. Second to that was an increased marketing, third was solidifying or strengthening their relationships with existing customers, and fourth was enhanced operations and systems.

Selected “Strategies” comments

“The challenging economic market is forcing companies to move outside their comfort zone. Those that respond quickly and efficiently will be better positioned once recovery begins.”

“Managing cash flow, backing out of existing land purchase agreements.”

“Leverage the heck out of our existing client base.”

“Customer service oriented, quality workmanship, lean business model, manage internal costs, increased marketing and sales efforts.”

“Never stop focusing on the customer first! Quality customer service along with quality product!”

“Developing a plan with timeframes and benchmarks to make additional reductions in overhead and staff.”

“Planning, using the crystal ball, crossing our fingers, not stepping on white lines, improving our marketing, getting better financial reporting, fine tuning our budget, watching our costs.

Emerging Trends. Among the emerging trends our members are predicting, it was no surprise to see energy efficiency becoming a big priority for customers, and home size and lot size waning in importance.

Selected “Emerging Trends” comments

“Energy efficient, sustainable building is (finally!) catching on and something that’s in most conversations in some way, shape or form.”

“Need products such as energy efficient replacement windows and baths are holding up substantially better and are a lower cost product.”

“They want the assurance they’re dealing with a reputable contractor. Not someone who will ‘take the money and run’.”

“Our customers are becoming more interested ‘green’ options that do not add significant cost i.e. open cell foam insulation, on-demand hot water units, geo-thermal systems or high SEER rated heat pumps, etc.”

“Cheaper more affordable homes, more storage, more garage, assistance with sale of their home.”

“It is a buyer’s market, so we are definitely working to be more flexible in accomodating requests. On the positive side, our willingness to refer has continued to rise, and while the overall number of customers is down, each individual buyer seems to have a higher average rating of satisfaction with their home and service from our team.”

“Green is big in the media, but the public seems somewhat less excited about the fast running train to Green. They still want their granite countertops in lieu of closed cell insulation.”

UPDATE: Download the complete summary by clicking here.

One of the juiciest features of the GuildQuality program is the Project Filters feature. Creating customized Project Filters gives you the ability to discern even more valuable information from the standard customer satisfaction feedback. This element enables you to “tag” surveys with specific characteristics, such as the salesperson that did the deal, the project manager in charge of construction, the neighborhood in which the home was built, the company division under which the project falls, etc. When you create these “tags”, you can then look at the hundreds of data points you might have, and narrow the information down by your filters. For example: compare the performance of all salespeople to one another; see which project managers are managing expectations appropriately; identify which company division ranks the highest in customer satisfaction; view only projects in the Design/Build division. View a short video tutorial on how to create Project Filters here.

In the same vein of Project Filters comes Question Bundles. Creating Question Bundles allows you to group together specific questions by type and then view these specific groups on the reporting side of things. For example: questions related to the communication process, problem resolution, and schedule of the job are directly related to the performance of the project manager. Create a “Project Manager” Question Bundle, selecting these specific questions to form the group.

When used together, Project Filters and Question Bundles can deliver a highly-targeted view of performance. For example: view a Project Manager Scorecard, selecting only the Project Manager Bundle, and you have a report card of how well your project managers perform in categories for which they are explicitly responsible. Take a look at the picture below – we can see how each of our project managers perform in comparison to one another, in the specific duties that pertain to their role.

Another way to utilize Question Bundles is to compare Bundles to one another. In the example below, we’ve set up Bundles for the sales side, production side, and office side of our company. We’ve generated a Scorecard report comparing these Bundles to one another in order to see which facets of our company are delivering a great customer experience.