GuildQuality

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.