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

I am sorry to report that GuildQuality was offline this afternoon between about 4pm EST and 8pm EST. If you tried to use the reporting system or contact us during that period, you no doubt had trouble.

In addition to the reporting application and the public website being down, GuildQuality’s email was unavailable. This made it impossible to communicate to our members that there was a problem and to respond to requests for help or information.

I understand the outage was a product of a massive power failure at our hosting facility in Dallas. When I have more information, I’ll update this post.

You can read more about how a major company communicates updates about performance issues when all of their internal communication systems are down by clicking here, and you can see how the world reacts to it by clicking here.

Despite the painful disruption, I have to commend the staff at Rackspace for handling the situation gracefully and professionally.

Again, my apologies for the inconvenience.

In Febraury, GuildQuality enhanced the design and flexibility of the Customer Report, but we didn’t “de-activate” the old reports that people were linking to from their websites. Beginning on July 1, those old reports will now re-direct to the new report format, and the old report format will no longer be available.

If you have already started using the new report, this is a non-issue for you. If you haven’t, here are seven important things to note:

1) You can edit the new report in the Marketing section of your account.

2) If you do nothing, the new report will include ONLY the comments you’ve previously selected for inclusion. Unless you update your report, it will no longer include average scores for the questions asked in your surveys.

3) The old report showed averages for all questions asked. The new report enables you to select which questions you want to display.

4) You can now specify the time period you’d like to display. By default, the new report will show “everything from all time,” and you can edit this to only show your “last 20 survey responses”, “last 12 months”, etc.

5) Those viewing the report can now see much more context. While we’ve added much more flexibility for the member, we’ve also added much more transparency for the viewer. In addition to the number of responses represented, we also share with them the period represented (i.e. “from June 2007 till now, with the most recent response received in February 2009″). So if a member is inactive or surveys intermittently, it will be obvious to the viewer.

6) You can now activate or deactivate your report. If you have previously shared the report with someone, and you no longer want people to be able to view it, you can deactivate it. Similarly, you can now have the report show up in your Qlist Profile.

And lastly:

7) Do I have to share my feedback with the world? I don’t believe our members are confused about this, but I definitely hear some confusion from prospective members. To clarify, we only publish your feedback if you tell us to. For the majority of our members, the only people that see their customer feedback are the member’s employees. Most of our members do an fantastic job though, and many use that feedback to help prospective customers get a better idea of what it would be like to buy one of their homes or hire them for a remodeling project.

In the June issue of Qualified Remodeler, Ken Betz interviews a number of remodelers about how they ensure referral and repeat business.

Guildmember Neil Kristianson of Crimson Design & Construction says,

Really everything we do, from the first meeting to last, is designed to get us referrals. I believe that if done right the clients will go out of their way to help and you don’t need to offer incentives to get referrals. If you have to pay, how heartfelt is it anyway?

He also lists GuildQuality among his core strategies for staying in touch with customers and delivering a great service experience.

In the article, Betz also interviewed me about the benefits of surveying. He sought my counsel on what is the one thing a business ought do with their survey feedback to improve performance. I advised that companies should share feedback with their employees in real-time, so that they can start seeing how their actions influence the customer’s exerience.

When that starts to happen with a business – without even really putting any strategy into place – you end up creating a culture of quality. Employees get in tune with what their customers are thinking, and they begin to think about the job in terms of how it is impacting their customers’ perspective. We tend to see a huge jump in performance when companies start to survey customers.

Many thanks to Wooden Window (Oakland, CA) and Francis Harvey & Sons (Worcester, MA) for sharing with Replacement Contractor the advantages they’ve experienced in outsourcing their customer satisfaction surveying to GuildQuality. Among the reasons they site:

“In-house efforts to solicit customer feedback on jobs lacked urgency, continuity, and follow-through.”

“…before joining GuildQuality…company foremen would hand clients a survey form, and salespeople would be responsible for following up. If surveys came back, they often just ended up in a file.”

“Joining GuildQuality provided the company with a steady flow of feedback, both minor gripes and gratitude.”

“GuildQuality feedback is especially useful for exterior jobs, where homeowners are often not present when the job is closed out.”

Click here to read more.

In his June “Trade Secrets” article in Professional Remodeler, Jonathan Sweet talks with Dan Wiedmann about how his company uses GuildQuality’s customer report to help prospects understand what type of experience they should expect to have if they choose to work with Weidmann Remodeling.

It’s helped us tremendously. I get calls from people who have gone to our Web site first and based on the recommendation have put us on the list of contractors they want to talk to.

Worth noting, in February we updated the look and feel of the Customer Report. Those using the new report have more customization opportunities and are able to monitor traffic to their new report. This has been in place since February. Beginning on July 1, all the old Customer Report links will redirect to the new report page.

Later in the piece, Jonathan highlights another Guildmember, Renewal Design-Build, and their new job security guarantee. He reports that in the event of job loss, job relocation, or inability to secure financing, Renewal will refund 50% of the retainer paid by the client.

Congratulations to Scott Siegal, owner of Maggio Roofing, on his recent purchase of the Certified Contractors Network (CCN).

Maggio has been a GuildQuality member since December 2008, and was honored this year as an inductee into the Remodeling Big 50.  Scott will continue to own and operate Maggio, while furthering the mission of CCN – to enhance the professionalism, performance and perception of the construction industry.

According to Replacement Contractor Online, CCN will have an increased focus on education, broadening the reach of marketing, sales, and field training.  There will also be a push to grow membership by developing joint programs with manufacturers and distributors.

In addition to Maggio, GuildQuality works with a number of other CCN members, including Twin Cities Siding, Istueta Roofing, Francis Harvey & Sons, Integrity Roofing, Southwest Exteriors, and Crown Roofing and Drainage.

GuildQuality’s member directory — the Qlist — includes lots of information about most of our builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors. And as such, it enjoys a tremendous amount of consumer traffic.

We’ve invested a lot of energy in designing and improving the Qlist, always with a focus on making it as helpful as possible for consumers who are looking to learn more about the members of our community of quality.

A couple months ago, we tweaked the default sort order, so that it no longer sorted companies solely by the content of their profile, but also by the consistency of their survey feedback. The more consistently someone has been surveying over the past year, the more likely they are to appear near the top of the list.

Last night we introduced a third component: “interestingness” (I believe the concept was first widely used by Flickr for photo sharing). Now, in addition to the amount of content and the consistency of surveying, members in the Qlist are also ranked by how interesting visitors have found their profile page to be.

To measure “interestingness”, we divide the number of visitors to the profile by the number of total “clicks” during the visit. The more likely someone is to click (on the members’ company website link, their Listings, their Customer Report, their Twitter page, etc), the more “interesting” we deem that listing, and the more Qlist juice we give it.

Each of the three categories (Amount of Content, Consistency of Surveying, and Interestingness) constitute roughly a third of the strength we give each profile in the default rankings. For each member, the first two won’t change very much, and the last one (Interestingness) will change daily: Clicks made on Tuesday impact Wednesday’s sort order.

With this addition, consumer behavior will begin impacting profile sort rankings. The more engaging people find your content, the higher you’ll rank. Our idea is that this will reward members who include lots of compelling content, and it will make our Qlist an even stronger resource for consumers looking to learn more about some great companies.

This morning, Dennis DuRoff posted my talk from yesterday on how and why GuildQuality uses social media. In it, I describe the various ways the GuildQuality blog, Twitter and LinkedIn help us to service our members and grow our business. I also talk about social media’s direct relevance to customer satisfaction in building and remodeling. how builders and remodelers are using Facebook, and how consumer rating sites like Kudzu and Google Local fit in to the picture as well. I close with a brief description of what GuildQuality does to help boost our members’ presence on the web and participation in the online dialog. The talk lasts an hour.

UPDATE: Following are the answers to questions asked by attendees, that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar:

“How much time do you spend on all this social media stuff?” I am our company’s primary marketer, and it is safe to say that I’m also the face of the company. Including the time I spend writing our blog (which provides 95% of the content for our newsletters), I probably spend fourty five minutes a day on social media for GuildQuality. Most of that is our blog, a good bit is with Twitter, and the remainder is with LinkedIn.

“How do you link Flickr to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter?” Facebook and Plaxo have some built in widgets that enable you to auto-feed your Flickr photos to your personal account. I don’t believe Facebook can do that yet for Company Pages or Groups. LinkedIn does not offer a way to connect to your Flickr account. You can set up your Twitter account to automatically post a tweet of Flickr uploads (or blog posts, or anything that can have an RSS feed) with Twitterfeed. Detailed instructions are here. Twitterfeed isn’t the only game in town, but it is what we use, and it’s worked fine for us. It is also worth noting that Flickr’s terms of use explicitly prohibit commercial uses, so if you intend to try and sell stuff with Flickr, make sure you read this.

Regarding Facebook Groups versus Pages (for your business presence on Facebook), one of the audience members added the following comment, essentially restating more emphatically my counsel to use Pages: “The skinny from those at Facebook is that much more energy (from the company) is going into Pages and Groups are fading to the background.”

“What are your recommendations for Security Settings for Professional and Personal Facebook and Linkedin Sites? How much should you reveal on public areas Etc?” On my profile pages, I avoid publishing anything that I don’t want anyone to see, and so I go ahead and make everything public. If you are interested in publishing things that you don’t want others to see, I encourage you to really think about whether or not you ought to publish it. GuildQuality does have a private discussion group on LinkedIn that is limited to our members, employees, and others that are “close” to us. Keeping it private keeps it from being dominated by people trying to sell their stuff (sales pitches seem to dominate the public groups on LinkedIn). Flickr and YouTube offer privacy settings that enable you to share some personal things (pictures and videos) only with authorized users. I stick to my “don’t post it if you don’t want someone to see it” strategy with those sites as well, though I ocassionally “privatize” pictures/videos in which my children or wife are looking just too darn cute for public consumption.

“What are costs of these sites?” Most of the social media sites I described, including Yelp, are free. Kudzu (another consumer rating site) offers some premium services for a monthly fee. Flickr charges $20 per year for a premium account (which you will definitely need if you want to use it regularly). You can have a GuildQuality account for as little as $30 per month, and the more folks you survey, the more you pay. You can also pay a little more to increase the number of Listings and Examples of Work you post in your public Guildmember profile page.

“What are good apps to use on the iPhone for all of these links?” I probably do 90% of my Twittering when I’m standing in line, in the dentist’s waiting room, etc. The iPhone’s web browsing capabilities make it easy to get your geek on wherever you are. Yelp has a nice iPhone enabled website. I use the Twitterrific application for Twitter, and I understand a lot of people really like Tweetie. Facebook and LinkedIn both have their own decent iPhone applications.

“How does one setup a company page on linked in or facebook?” First, you’ve got to have a personal account with Facebook or LinkedIn. Assuming you do, and assuming you are logged in, click here for Facebook and here for LinkedIn.

A couple days ago I shared a preliminary summary of which social networks customers were most likely to visit to learn more about a builder or remodeler. Today, I checked out a summary from our AddThis account to see which services the visitors to our website are most likely to use to publish information about your company. [click on the little "share" doohickey with the orange "plus" symbol in the sidebar of this blog to learn about AddThis]

Facebook is still the clear champ with about 35% of all “shares”, but Twitter holds a strong second with about 20% of all shares.

I believe that the kind of people that publish content to the web represent a leading indicator of where people will be going to consume content on the web. Twitter is still relatively new compared to Facebook, and it is presently on a much faster user growth trajectory. I’m interested to review this information in a few months, and see if Twitter has gained more ground as both a vehicle to publish information and a vehicle to consume information.

The leader: Facebook.

When presented with an opportunity to click on a link to a social network — either after they’ve completed a customer satisfaction survey or when they are viewing a Qlist profile page — customers are about three times more likely to visit your Facebook page as they are to visit any other social network.

Facebook seems to be the overwhelming champion based on my review of about 2500 pageviews from the last 30 days. When one of those pages displays a Facebook icon, one out of 24 pageviews results in a click. The next best performer is the consumer rating site Kudzu at 1 out of 59. Then Yelp and Twitter at about 1 out of 65. Only 1 out of 85 customers clicked on a Google Local or LinkedIn logo when given the opportunity.

Worth noting, so far only about 40 members have incorporated any social media into their Qlist profile or post-survey-submit page, and “pass-thru” rates vary dramatically from member to member. Some members haven’t gotten a single pass-thru to one of their social networks, many are tracking around 33%, and one is at 50%. Given the dramatic variances from member to member, my findings may change in a couple months.

But one thing is for sure, as more and more consumers engage in social networks, these rates are only going to increase.

Join us on June 23rd – 10am Pac/1pm Eastern for a webinar hosted by GuildQuality Alliance member Dennis DuRoff of the Builders & Remodelers Newsletter.

Click here to register.

Producing engaging newsletter content on a regular basis isn’t a core competency for most small- and mid-sized building and remodeling companies. A number of Guildmembers have resolved that problem by working with Dennis’ company to manage their newsletter production and administration. Dennis is also a regular speaker and business coach, and was introduced to me by one of our very first Guildmembers. He is hosting a June 23rd webinar for Guildmembers on unique, low cost, and turnkey marketing programs for builders and remodelers.

From the Webinar Invitation:

How builders & remodelers respond to the recession will go a long way toward determining future success & company survival. Builders report that marketing strategies that worked in the past are no longer producing results.

They cite several reasons:

#1 – As markets slow, buyers feel like they are in charge of the sales process making the time from contact to contract longer than ever. How can you stay on your prospects radar when they are finally ready to pull the trigger?

#2 – Traffic is down; leads are more difficult to come by. It is becoming as important to cultivate leads as it is to generate them.

#3 – Builders know they’ve got to market their business but cash is tight and staff is cut to the bone. How can you consistently – stay in touch – without breaking the budget or compromising your staff?

Over 100 of the finest Builders and Remodelers in the country have found a straightforward, affordable, turnkey solution to help them through these difficult times.

This webinar, presented by Dennis DuRoff – founder of The Builder and Remodelers Newsletter, professional business coach, industry speaker, and author – is an opportunity to see how Builders and Remodelers are using our stay-in-touch program to help get them through.

I honestly feel that without this unobtrusive and educational communication tool, we would fade to distant memory and not be on the forefront of our contacts minds. Your newsletter is a key part of our marketing that gives us the biggest bang for the buck. ~ GuildQuality member Doug Tumlin, Pilot Builders

Dennis will cover:

>> Why the Builder and Remodeler Newsletters are fully turnkey while being highly personalized to you and your company.

>> How the Builder Newsletter can increase web traffic.

>> What makes the builder newsletter different than other newsletters you’ve seen.

>> How this newsletter can help build your brand.

>> How the builder newsletter is different than any other newsletter service on the market.

On this Thursday, June 18 at 1pm Eastern, I’ll be giving a repeat performance of my webinar from April on Social Media. Dennis DuRoff, of The Builders & Remodelers Newsletter, has invited me to present a version of this talk to the remodelers and homebuilders that subscribe to his Monday Morning Business Gem newsletter.

Click here to register or to see all the details about the webinar.

Since my first presentation in April, a bunch of people have requested repeat or make-up presentations. Each time, I’ve tweaked the talk (hopefully for the better!), so if you’ve seen a version before, I encourage you to tune in for this one.

In May, we learned that two of the four finalists for the 2009 Fred Case Entrepreneur of the Year Award are GuildQuality members:

- Chris Edelen, President and CEO, Leafguard by Beldon (San Antonio).  GQ member since October 2008.

- Todd Jackson, President and CEO, Jackson Design and Remodeling (San Diego).  GQ member since February 2006.

The award is given to those individuals who exhibit innovation and leadership during their career, setting a standard for the remodeling profession.  The winner will be announced at the Remodeling Show in Indianapolis this Fall.

Congratulations, Chris and Todd!

If you are in Atlanta for the Southern Building Show and/or the Chrysalis Awards, please join us for Happy Hour at Sweetwater Brewing Company from 5:30 to 7:30.

Click here or call 404-691-ALES for directions. If you get lost or have questions, you can also call or text me at four zero four, four four one, twenty seven twenty eight (Is it ok for me to put my mobile number out on the internet?).

Important Note: Sweetwater Brewery has only one thing on the menu. I suggest you eat before or plan to eat after.

Late this evening, we’re updating the GuildQuality application with a number of enhancements. A few are behind the scenes, but two are nice additions for our members: Remember Settings & Prospect Surveying.

For some time, we’ve been providing telephone/email/mail prospect surveying for a small number of our members who were interested in high-response-rate, comment-rich prospect surveying. These members want to learn about their prospects’ experience with the sales team and their impressions of the company and the product.

We’ve been surveying prospects for a couple years with email-only surveying. But early last year, a number of members began asking us if we would survey their prospects in a way that would produce a higher response rate and a lot more commentary. Said another way, they wanted to receive the same rich information about their prospects as they already were getting with GuildQuality’s regular customer satisfaction surveying.

And we’ve had great success. We’ve seen these members get so much value out of it that we took these customized projects and engineered them into something that was standard and available for all members.

To access this new functionality (starting on June 4), visit the Surveying Admin section of your account, and you’ll notice that there is a new default survey template for prospect surveying. You’ll may also notice that you can create a new type of survey: “Prospect Survey.”

The distinct survey type enables us to segregate responses in your reporting system (so we don’t mix in prospect feedback with your customer feedback). It also lets our surveying team know the context of the relationship, and speak with your customers appropriately.

If you are interested in this, please let out support team know, and they can help you get started.