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

Congratulations to Wickstead Works for winning EarthCraft’s Remodeler of the Year Award. Read all about it at the Atlanta Real Estate Forum. WicksteadWorks became a Guildmember in November 2008, and we’re glad to have them as part of our community of quality.

In October, I published some summary stats contrasting customer satisfaction among our members that have grown (in number of customers), those that have shrunk, and those that have shut their doors.

Michael & Dave just updated that data for me, and the results aren’t surprising. I intend to post more elaboration later, but in the meantime, here’s the summary: (just added the chart below)

Growing Businesses: Active businesses that have increased their number of customers in the most recent 12 months relative to the prior period. Average Recommendation Rate in the most recent 12 month period = 96.1% (up 2% from six months ago).

Shrinking Businesses: Active businesses that have had fewer customers in the most recent 12 months relative to the prior period. Average Recommendation Rate in the most recent 12 month period = 95.6% (up 3.5% from six months ago).

Failed Businesses: Businesses that have closed down in the last twelve months. Average Recommendation Rate in the most recent 12 month period = 74.3% (down 6.5% from six months ago).

The recommendation rate gap between growing businesses and failed businesses has more than doubled in six months.

This post from long-time member Structures Building Company has been live for more than six months, but I just noticed it.

The post starts with, “We believe that each day is full of opportunities for us to leave our signature on all of our work. As individuals and a team, we keep ourselves accountable to each other but really value the feedback of each of our clients.”

And it ends with some very kind words about what our service means to their team. Thanks guys! It’s feedback like this that keeps us at it.

On a related note, Structures member ID number is 13. That means they’ve been with us since the very beginning.

Intown Renovations is working on Saint Charles in Virginia-Highland. This is part of a new series, wherein I post every time I see one of our member’s signs and can snap a picture.

John is on a road trip. From the press release:

“John Wieland, chief executive officer and founder of leading southeast homebuilder John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods, today launched the “Get Housing Moving” tour to educate consumers about the importance of the new home industry in economic recovery and to build awareness of the value of buying a home while prices are deeply discounted and interest rates are at historic lows.”

The tour involves an RV and an inflatable mattress. I encourage you to follow his progress in his own words: John launched his blog on March 5 with an inaugural tweet. You can also follow him on Twitter.

You can now follow GuildQuality on Twitter.

Thanks to Erin for setting this up, and for getting everyone on the Twitter bandwagon.

If you are a GuildQuality member, please join the GuildQuality LinkedIn Discussion Group.

I started this some time ago on a whim, seeing that it was new functionality offered by LinkedIn. Soon after, a handful of our members actually started requesting to join. More recently, I’ve found it to be an excellent venue for bouncing GuildQuality-related ideas around and soliciting advice.

Last week, I invited a bunch of members, and the number of folks in the group jumped to over 100 (congratulations to Terry of Harrington Homes for being the 100th). I’ve kept the group invitation-only. The limited access enables us to discuss semi-proprietary subjects.

“Even in this very challenging housing environment, the appeal of ecologically-friendly homes seemed to overcome the gloom in the economy. Our eco-promotion resonated strongly with consumers and drove more qualified traffic to our sales centers,” said Kathi James, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Beazer Homes. “This led to over 500 net new home orders in the month of February.”

From CNBC. This announcement yesterday contributed to Beazer’s 65% jump in stock price.

Last night, David pushed another enhancement to the GQ reporting system. You won’t notice most of the work, but there are a few things relating to exporting data that are worth pointing out.

You can now export information from the Projects & Surveying section. Want to get a list of all your customers who haven’t responded to surveys? Here’s where you go. Want to get a list of all of your customers that have wrong numbers or bad email addresses? Look no further than this fancy button. Want to get a list of all customers from a particular neighborhood who worked with a particular salesperson? Voila!

We also tightened up survey response exporting feature. You’ve been able to export all your survey feedback for several years, but for some reason, those exports only included customer name and address. They now include phone numbers and email addresses. Want to get a contact list of your happiest customers (or least happy)? Now your export includes all the info you need to create a mail merge or an email list.

Lastly, and by popular demand, we removed the pre-formatting of exports. Our “power” users (me included) regularly export this data for their own analysis. Before diving into their serious number crunching, they had to delete the GQ logo, remove the freeze panes, eliminate the colors, and simplify the text formatting. Now your exports are pristine — column headers are in row 1, and the moment you open the file, you are ready to start crunching.

A couple final thoughts about why we believe exports are really important:

1) We can’t predict every analytical need for every member. Even if we could, designing a reporting application that did everything for everyone would invariably result in a reporting application that did very little well, and lots of things poorly. Data exports empower you to do what you need to do with your data.

2) We don’t want to trap you. I have been trapped by software before. I have been forced to stay with systems for no other reason than they held my data hostage and made it impossible for me to switch without enduring great pain and great cost. The end result for the service provider was, instead of just losing a moderately satisfied paying customer, they kept a paying customer who actively encouraged others NOT to buy their service. The end result for me was pain and sadness. I don’t want you to experience that feeling, and that’s why we let you export your data. This is part of our larger objective to earn your business every month.

GuildQuality has a handful of valued vendors, without whom we couldn’t deliver our service. Our printer, Imagers, is one that’s especially critical to our success.

Imagers prints and mails all of our survey mailers. And this is a complicated job that required a LOT of up front work from both GQ and Imagers. Every single survey mailer is unique to the recipient — personalized with their contact info, the relevant survey information they need, and our member’s full color, high-resolution logo. The mailers are sharp and they definitely contribute to a great survey experience for customers.

I am reminded of Imagers importance for a few reasons. First, we’ve just wrapped up an especially large surveying project. GuildQuality just surveyed thousands of customers for candidates of Remodeling Magazine’s Big50 Awards. As always, Imagers executed flawlessly.

They also take care of our Guildmaster certificates — a project we’re starting up right now. They’ll print hundreds of personalized diploma-quality certificates with raised stamped seals. These certificates are works of art.

But perhaps the main reason I value our relationship with Imagers is more about what they don’t do: They don’t make me worry. They don’t require maintenance or management. They don’t bark or hem or haw. They simply get the job done, and they do it better than I would expect. This is the kind of experience we learn from and seek to emulate in the service we deliver to our members and their customers.

Via FlowingData:

Replacement Contractor Magazine interviewed Francis Harvey & Sons (Worcester, MA) and Wooden Window (Oakland, CA) about customer satisfaction surveying. Both were kind enough to share their experiences with GuildQuality.

Here’s what Bill Essert had to say about why his company signed on with GQ:

I’d had enough pain,” says Bill Essert, president of Wooden Window, a California company that makes and installs its own custom wood windows. In-house efforts to solicit customer feedback on jobs lacked urgency, continuity, and follow-through, Essert says.