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

Generally I do not like surveys because they tend to be long and tedious. Yours was very easy to do and I enjoyed completing it.

This comment was provided by one of our recent survey respondents. It warms my heart to know that our philosophy of surveying and reporting, as radically different as it is from conventional survey companies, not only produces award winning results for building professionals of all types and sizes, but also leaves customers saying things like this.

Traditionally, researchers have endeavored to suck as much information as possible out of every customer who is willing to participate in a survey. While this may give statisticians something they like (more numbers) does it really help to improve the customer’s experience?

Unfortunately, the important question “Would this survey annoy a customer?” never enters the minds of most researchers. Hence the 50+ question “satisfaction” surveys that you are bombarded with on a regular basis.

Well, that question is constantly on the minds of our team. I recently wrote:

We are proud of the reporting, analytics, and user interface we’ve built for our members. They can easily understand trends in their performance, set goals, and chart their progress toward continuous improvement. But if we couldn’t deliver a great surveying experience for the customer and make each individual survey response valuable to the member, all that great reporting would be worthless.

The quality of our survey experience is something we closely monitor. We have strong “survey respondent satisfaction” ratings and we’re constantly working to improve them, just as we constantly work to improve the quality of feedback and reporting we deliver to our members. In fact, I believe the two go hand-in-hand — the better an experience we deliver to survey respondents, the more feedback they provide us, and the more valuable our service becomes to our members.

All of the customers we survey receive a mailer that enables them to visit the GQ site and review the feedback they’ve provided. When they return, we also request that they answer a single question about their experience with our survey process. In addition to providing a rating, they can also provide any kind of commentary they like (we believe comments are VERY important).

What follows are some more of their recent comments:

Very user friendly.

The person doing the survey was courteous & professional. The
survey itself was brief & easy. The questions (themselves) had
no bias.

Short and simple.

I believe your survey covered the major areas of concern

Very easy to respond.

Simple, direct and short.

Very easy to complete, very meaningful questions. Thank you!

It was quick and simple and yet easy to comment.

Very good and valid questions.

I appreciated that they asked if it was okay to call me again if
I forgot to submit my survey – very thoughtful and understanding
approach.

An easy survey. The Qs were clear and the survey was
sufficiently short and the user interface design / organization
was very intuitive. Most importantly, the Qs seems to query the
right mix of key areas.

Required less time than imagined.

well laid out format for the presentation of the questions…
easy to move through quickly without feeling you have to spend
too much time.

It was really great!

Every builder should have this survey available to their
customers…great tool.

This was a good length for a survey. I would not change a thing.

I appreciated the space allowed for further explanation and
complete answers to your last questions. Thanks

Felt questions covered all aspects of the process.

This is a great way to capture feedback about the purchasing
experience with [member name]. The reminder was helpful.

Good survey instrument, well set up, good questions, room for
comments – all positive.

Process is straightforward and not too time-consuming.

Concise; to the point; and didn’t take too much of MY time.

I like it because it is concise and to the point.

simple, straightforward. as good a survey as I have seen.

Not too long, but thorough.

I started this business, at least in part, because I am a numbers jock. I get great pleasure out of building models and finding correlations between the things I measure. And we use this feedback in the same way we use our own member satisfaction feedback — to recognize excellence, to set goals, and to drive continuous improvement in the quality of our service.

I am waiting for the mechanic to finish servicing my old Jeep, and just noticed the “No Money Back Guarantee.”

If you’re not satisfied with our service, we’ll repair it again for free, or your money back.

If you are going to change your guarantee, spring for a new sign. The red tape doesn’t inspire confidence.

In addition to producing our own Guildmaster Awards, GuildQuality powers customer service awards for a number of organizations — from franchises to home builders associations to magazines. Right now, we’re deep into surveying for applicants of Remodeling Magazine’s celebrated Big50. I was reviewing responses for those applicants today, and spent some extra time in their comments.

One of the last questions on all of the surveys is “How did you first find out about [company name]?” Just for fun, I plugged all of those answers into Wordle to produce a cloud of the 500 most frequently used words. The larger the word is displayed in the cloud, the more frequently it appears in the comments.

“Friend” and “neighbor” are pretty easy to spot. Can you find “radio”? How about “ad” or “advertisement”? They are in there, but you have to look hard.

Last week, the CPHB awarded Sharp Residential a Customer Satisfaction Award for Best Among Volume Builders. Congratulations to the team at Sharp.

This award comes on the heels of J.D. Power and Associates ranking Sharp Residential second in Atlanta, just behind another GuildQuality member, John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods.

March 1 Update: In January, I received a press release from Sharp Residential about this, but I neglected to mention that a number of our members received recognition from the CPHB for their outstanding service. Congratulations to all of them:

Bongers Builders Group

Calhoun Properties

Hiluard Kitchens Homes

Windsong Properties

Mayfield Homes

Veritas Homes

Richport Properties

Qualified Remodeler profiled the work and progress of one of our long-time members, Boise-based Strite design+remodel. The article also described Strite’s focus on the customer experience, and their use of GuildQuality in monitoring performance and setting goals.

I have had the great pleasure to participate in a roundtable facilitated by Jim Strite. He’s a true gentleman, a seasoned professional, and a caring business owner.

His closing commentary is indicative of Jim’s positive philosophy:

“Regardless of (economic) conditions, you have the capability of responding to those conditions,” Strite said. “… It’s easy to reiterate the gloom and doom because it’s all over the news. It’s more challenging to look for the positive and to look at the areas that we can influence and change for the better.

“That is a very challenging thing for company leadership to get that culture built so that people are looking at the glass half full versus half empty,” he said. “Yes, the market is down, but look at all the opportunities. There are still people out there who want to do remodels. The question is how do we find those people, and how do we better service those people so they tell other people?”

Farewell, President Bush. Thank you for your service to our country. Welcome, President Obama. My heartfelt congratulations, and best wishes for a successful tenure as President of the United States.

Barack Obama said some things yesterday afternoon that especially resonated with me. From his inauguration speech:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

I favor small and limited government, and, despite my admiration of much that “Obama the Candidate” brought to the table, I was uncomfortable with a great deal of his pre-election rhetoric. However, I have been continually impressed with the rhetoric of “Obama the President-Elect”. Where we may differ in political philosophy, we seem aligned in our appreciation of operational efficiency.

His insistence on responsibility and accountability reinforced a message he expressed in a brief press conference earlier this month, wherein he announced the appointment of a new Chief Performance Officer — a metrics guru from McKinsey & Company.

He said that, even in good economic times, the country can no longer afford to squander “billions of tax dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of a lobbyist or interest group,” but that the current downturn makes taking action on government waste particularly urgent.

I started GuildQuality in large part because of my belief that we must measure progress and performance if we intend to accomplish great things or continually improve the quality of our offering. It seems to me that the Obama administration shares this belief, and I am, hopeful that the outcome will be as fruitful as the rhetoric is inspiring.

We’re presently receiving about three and a half comments per customer satisfaction survey response and about 20 words per comment. That is with an average survey response rate over 70%.

We are proud of the reporting, analytics, and user interface we’ve built for our members. They can easily understand trends in their performance, set goals, and chart their progress toward continuous improvement. But if we couldn’t deliver a great surveying experience for the customer and make each individual survey response valuable to the member, all that great reporting would be worthless.

A significant part of the value associated with our unique survey process lies in the rich customer commentary we receive along with the real-time delivery of feedback from a significant majority of customers.

One of the especially nice things about the comment-rich nature of our feedback, is that we don’t have to annoy the customer with many dozens of questions. The last thing a satisfaction survey should do is annoy the customer! Instead, it should give them an opportunity to inform their builder or remodeler — both with quantitative feedback and qualitative commentary that describes an opportunity for improvement or an area of excellence.

Here are a few representative comments from a handful of responses we received this morning:

My gate was broken and I couldn’t get it locked. I had to call them 4 or 5 times to get that really taken care of.” (Warranty)

“The Showroom staff and the manual were great. The manual showing the Showroom options is very well done and easy to understand.” (Showroom)

“If I had paid closer attention to the blueprints, I would have chosen a different layout for the kitchen.” (Any Changes)

We don’t need to ask the customer to rate their satisfaction with the cabinets or the carpet to learn whether or not there’s a problem. Instead, we ask them to rate the Quality of Construction, and we encourage them to provide commentary. The member sees low (or high) scores under “Construction Quality”, then also sees comments informing them WHY the scores are low (or high).

If they see some negative comments about cabinet installation, and the member wants to specifically monitor that facet of construction quality, they can then add a single question to the survey about cabinet installation, and monitor performance for that specific issue.

We survey this way because our first and greatest priority is to positively represent the members for whom we’re surveying. This means rule number one is delivering an exceptional experience to the survey respondent. However you survey your customers (whether with GuildQuality, in-house, or with another service provider), I encourage you to ask yourself these questions:

What kind of survey would I feel comfortable responding to? After more than a few minutes of answering specific questions about the details of my home, would I grow annoyed?

To read what survey respondents have to say about their experience with our survey process, read this recent post.

“Startling” findings from the American Marketing Association:

From 1996-2003, the [publicly traded companies that rank among the top 20% in customer satisfaction] outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93%, the S&P 500 by 201%, and NASDAQ by 335%.

Our own research within the building and real estate industry echoes these findings. See here and here for some more recent findings on the relationship between customer satisfaction and profit, and here for a correlation between customer satisfaction and bankruptcy.

This paper could stand to be refreshed for today’s market, but I suspect the same trend would hold true. The companies that ranked ranked in customer satisfaction were increasing their lead as time went on.

As discussed in this recent post, the internet is enabling customers to make more informed decisions about where to spend their money — pushing more market share to the best service providers, and making it harder and harder for lackluster performers to close business.

Thanks to Geoff Hartnett for sending me the article.

Literally. Just ask this Atlanta-area Chili’s owner.