GuildQuality

Since the fourth quarter of 2008, we’ve regularly surveyed our members, asking their opinions about the near term future for both their company and the the construction and real estate industry. (click here to view all past reports)

In each Member Predictions Survey, we ask our members to answer two primary questions:

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in YOUR COMPANY’S PERFORMANCE over the next six months?”

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in THE MARKET over the next six months?”

As in prior quarters, more than 100 of our members participated. This quarter’s feedback (provided between mid-December and this morning) showed the most optimism since we began our “Guildmember Predictions” surveying. What follows are two ways of viewing their feedback, as well as all of the additional comments provided by our homebuilders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors.

Guildmember Confidence Index (GCI)

The Guildmember Confidence Index boils all of the answers down to a single number. We calculate the GCI by subtracting the percentage of members predicting decline from the percentage predicting improvement. Therefore, a positive number means more members predict things will be getting better than worse. The only quarter in which the GCI has been negative (so far) has been Q4 2008.

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As a follow up to our mid-year post on the same subject, here are a list of the 10 most viewed member profiles:

1. Big State Remodeling

2. Carnemark Systems & Design

3. Betenbough Homes

4. Ivey Residential

5. Curb Appeal Renovations

6. Quadrant Homes

7. Conaway Homes

8. Penguin Windows

9. Case Design/Remodeling

10. Structures Building Company

And here are the 10 most-viewed member customer reports:

1. Penguin Windows

2. Heritage Homes

3. Francis Harvey & Sons

4. Thompson Creek

5. Normandy Builders

6. Case Design/Remodeling

7. Jeff Benton Homes

8. Carnemark Systems & Design

9. Curb Appeal Renovations

10. GuildQuality (that’s us!)

11. Westpoint Homes

Following are the top 10 posts of 2009, by pageviews (hat tip to Signal vs Noise):

1. May 6: Member Predictions & Strategies

2. September 30: Call for Entries: 2010 Guildmaster Awards

3. January 27: How did you find out about us?

4. April 20: New Release: GuildQuality & Social Media

5. July 16: Prospect Surveying is Now Available

6. April 21: Coastal Living Idea House in I’On

7. July 1: Guildmember Confidence Climbs in 2nd Quarter

8. February 27: Announcing the 2009 Guildmaster Award Winners

9. February 11: Overhaul of GuildQuality Marketing Resources

10. May 4: Guildmembers Most Viewed in the Qlist Year to Date

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On December 3, GuildQuality hosted a webinar to review some of our marketing resources.

This webinar is for builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject. We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we also discuss prospect surveying.

Each year, Rackspace sponsors a customer service competition. The “Fanati” award is designed to recognized “fanatical” service among the company’s customers. This year’s application required that candidates submit a 5 minute video about their company.

In our video application, you’ll hear three Atlanta-area members describe why they use GuildQuality, what we do for them, and what kind of people make up our team.

Special thanks to Dwayne Hill at Traton Homes, Kelly Rulis at John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods, Dan Weidmann of Weidmann Remodeling, and Alan Stump (the video’s producer).

Way back in 2003, Frank Lott, III of Heritage Homes in Mobile, Alabama signed on with my shiny new company, GuildQuality. Frank is an excellent guy, and one of the members that I sincerely lament isn’t here in Atlanta where I could see him more frequently.

While preparing for a presentation tomorrow, I was spot checking the web presences of a bunch of the home builders, remodelers, developers, and contractors that rely on GuildQuality’s customer satisfaction surveying. When I googled “Heritage Homes, Mobile, AL”, up popped a bunch of Extreme Makeover videos from early 2008.

The Heritage team is filled with wonderful people, and you’ll see that come through in these amazing videos. I encourage you to check them out.

By the way, if you have interesting news to share about your company, don’t hesitate to send it our way. The people that make up our community of quality enjoy reading about our other members.

12/3 Update: The GuildQuality Home Book is now live. Click here to sign up for an account. As a reminder, we’re now field testing an early version of this service. Your feedback will help us work the bugs out and will also inform the way we expand and improve the service.

As we hinted a few weeks ago, we’ll soon privately launch a new service: The GuildQuality Home Book (working title). The GQ Home Book will enable people to easily record all the contractor and project information that relates to their home.

Those that sign up will receive invitations to participate in our private release when we go live with the service.

I’ve received a number of questions about the new service, and what follows is my attempt to answer the biggest ones.

“How much will it cost?”

We’re presently thinking it would be free. We may introduce premium features down the line and the consumer would pay for them, or they might be free to all customers of Guildmembers. We plan to execute it in a way that actively promotes and benefits our members so that the service will be a marketing, selling, and membership retention tool for GuildQuality.

“Who will control the information in the account?”

The consumer would control the information in their house record, and it would be private to them, though they could share it with select people or companies. As with current GQ data, we will probably aggregate the data somehow for the benefit of all users.

“Where did the idea come from?”

For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we can help strengthen the relationship between members and their customers beyond the surveying process. Some time ago, my wife shared with me an article about keeping a “home journal” and that got my wheels turning. I pitched it to a bunch of people thereafter, and they liked it a lot. Then in October, I did a focus group with about a dozen members, and the reception all around was sufficiently positive to prompt us to spend some engineering time on it.

“Why aren’t you launching the Home Book for everyone right now?”

We like to develop things iteratively. That helps us keep projects small with the expectation that we can make improvements as we go along. This also saves us the burden of developing a project for a year, and then launching it only to discover a year’s worth of miscues when we see it operating out in the wild.

The product we have right now is a simple stand-alone service. It includes consumer-facing functionality that lets people record the important stuff that relates to their home. But before we launch publicly, we have a handful of additional things we’d like to add to facilitate the relationship between homeowners and our members.

“How do you intend for it to “facilitate the relationship” between the homeowner and the Guildmember?”

We expect to add at least three things in to the Home Book accounts before we launch publicly.

First is the auto-creation of a Home Book account for people that complete surveys. By automagically creating a survey respondents account, we can auto-populate it with a bunch of relevant project and Guildmember information and save them the hassle of having to enter all that stuff in themselves.

The second is a feed of cool information about the GuildQuality member that is listed in their account. So in addition to tracking things about their home, the user can also see what the member is up to elsewhere. We believe this will help members stay top-of-mind for the homeowner, facilitate additional work in the future, and encourage referrals to friends and family.

Third, we intend to create some interconnectivity between each Home Book and the Guildmembers’ project record inside the existing member accounts. Our members’ will be able to add some things into each Home Book where they are listed as a contractor. Think warranty and service management, special offers and messages for past customers, and a place where both member and customer can record information about ongoing work.

“How does this jive with the GuildQuality mission?”

GuildQuality’s mission is to elevate the stature of the building, remodeling, and real estate profession. We primarily do that with our customer satisfaction surveying by helping our members deliver great service. For the last couple years, we’ve been fueling that effort by celebrating the quality we see in our community — if more people choose great companies to buy from and build with, then fewer people will have bad experiences, and this will strengthen the industry as a whole. The homeowner accounts will provide a platform for the ongoing promotion of the existing relationships formed between members and customers. My thinking is that the customer/contractor relationship shouldn’t end with the sale of the home or the completion of the renovation, and there’s great value for both parties by helping to continue it.

Register for an invitation. Let me know if you’d like to receive an invite to try out the GuildQuality Home Book when we privately launch next week. 12/3 update: We’re now live. Click here to sign up.

Earlier in the year, we announced a partnership with the Pella Certified Contractor (PCC) program, wherein GuildQuality became the preferred provider of customer satisfaction surveying and an integral part of the PCC program.  Since that time, over 30 new PCCs have become members of the GuildQuality community, and this number continues to grow.

As an extension of our relationship with Pella, and to recognize those PCCs who are the “best of the best” in customer satisfaction, Pella has announced a new PCC Customer Satisfaction Award, powered by GuildQuality.  The award will recognize those PCCs who are delivering an outstanding customer experience, specifically for their Pella-related jobs.

To be eligible for the award, PCCs must be an active GuildQuality member as of December 31, 2009. In addition, the winners must survey a minimum of the last 20 completed Pella jobs, achieving a 90% recommendation rate  and 60% response rate to the surveys.  The award recipients will be notified in March 2010.

This award is a separate distinction from than the annual Guildmaster awards, and members may apply for both.

For more information, please contact GuildQuality’s sales department at 888-355-9223 or sales@guildquality.com.

In our Newsletter from November, you’ll find an article on best practices, a webinar invitation, member news, and an invite to beta test a new GuildQuality service.

Click here to review this year’s qualifications and apply for a 2010 Guildmaster Award. It takes less than 30 seconds to complete the form. So far, more than 100 members have requested to be considered for an award.

Some random factoids for your Thanksgiving Eve:

At the bottom of each page on our website, and at the top of every one of our Guildmember profile pages, visitors will find a little orange plus that encourages them to “Share”. This tiny feature, powered by AddThis, makes it easy for folks to share content from our site by email or via a social network. Visitors share something about GuildQuality (usually about our members) an average of just under three times a day. By what means are they sharing?

Email remains the market leader, with 31% of shares from the past two months. Old school printing is in second place with about 23%. And Facebook is the leader among the social networks, with 18% versus Twitter’s 14%.

If you find this of interest, then you are probably as dorky as I am, and you may also be interested in these stats about which social networks your customers are most likely to click to from member profiles or after they’ve completed a survey.

On November 20, 2000, I incorporated GuildQuality. It was a couple more years before I made the business my full time occupation, and it wasn’t until August of 2003 that GuildQuality’s surveying and reporting system first launched. A lot has changed since that fateful day in 2000. I got a dog, a wife (who came with another dog), a great group of employees, then a son, a daughter, and, along the way, hundreds of fantastic customers. Thanks to all of you for helping me realize what was, nine years ago, barely more than a vague idea. Today, our community of quality includes hundreds of the most quality-minded building, remodeling, and real estate professionals working today. Together they, along with our tremendous employees and supportive partners, are pushing GuildQuality and our mission forward. Together we are elevating the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance.

In October, the good people at Kohler hosted a handful of our custom homebuilders at their company headquarters in Kohler, Wisconsin. Business-wise, the trip included a tour of the historic factory and a series of focus groups. The Kohler team was interested in sharing with our homebuilders how they craft their products, and hearing our members’ thoughts on what Kohler can be doing to help them deliver superior quality and service to their homeowners.

The Kohler factory is an exhibit of craftsmanship from every period of our history. Kohler artisans are hand finishing fixtures almost immediately alongside giant robot arms and glowing vats of molten iron. If you are a builder or remodeler, and you ever you have an opportunity to visit Kohler, Wisconsin, you must go. I have never seen anything like it, and it elevated my appreciation of both American industry and industrial artistry.

But the visit wasn’t all business. We stayed at the historic American Club, dined at River Wildlife, and golfed at Whistling Straits. The food and comfort we experienced during our Kohler experience was surpassed only by the thoughtful hospitality of the Kohler team.

Last week, we rolled out a new feature providing homeowners with a summary email following the completion of a survey – even if the response was provided by telephone (55% of responses).  This is an opportunity for the homeowner to view their completed survey response, contact us if they’d like to make changes, and for members to share more information about their company and services (ie, the Member Profile and Customer Report).  This is also another step towards helping our members further engage the homeowner following the survey, and ties in with our forthcoming beta project.

12/9/09 UPDATE: Click here to view the recorded webinar.

A few weeks ago, I was spending some time with a number of our members. During our discussion about GuildQuality, their businesses, and state of the market, I was surprised to learn that many of them weren’t aware of our fantastic marketing resources. Upon learning more about what we offer, they encouraged me to get the word out via a webinar.

Webinar: December 3rd, 11am Eastern

On December 3rd, at 11am Eastern, I will be hosting a webinar tutorial for our builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject.

We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers, and I’m excited for the opportunity to share (or re-share) those with you.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we’ll also spend some time discussing prospect surveying (which now accounts for 15% of our total survey volume!).

With me will be Laura Summerlin (our Member Services Director) and Mark Miles (our COO).

Click here to register for our 1 hour webinar.