GuildQuality

July was a month of records for the GuildQuality team. Those records prompted us to wonder if we might be seeing some records in other areas that aren’t on our radar screen. The first area we checked was consumer traffic: How well our we promoting our community of quality?

For the first time, we examined the collective pageviews for all of our members’ profiles, listings, and customer reports:

In the last six months, consumer traffic to GuildQuality has doubled. During that period, membership growth has been relatively flat, so that means consumer traffic per member has also doubled.

Why the big increase? I suspect it relates to three major things:

1) Members are increasingly promoting that they are part of our community of quality.

2) We’ve refined the Qlist to make it easier for search engines to find and organize our members’ information, so we’re now showing up in more searches for quality-minded builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate companies.

3) As more companies are fighting over less work, consumers have far more choice, and they’ve started searching for more ways to differentiate the qualified businesses from the unqualified businesses.

Worth noting: We’ve consistently recorded Profile traffic since October of 2007; we started recording Listing traffic when we introduced Listings in October 2008; and though Customer Reports have been around longer than member Profiles, we only started recording traffic to them in mid-February of this year. So while Profile traffic and Listing traffic is accurate for the entire chart, Customer Report traffic is only accurate after February.

If you are interested in sharing your thoughts about our redesign of GuildQuality’s public website, you can access some design mockups via GuildQuality’s LinkedIn discussion group.

Back in early July, we posted a preview of the feedback to our most recent Guildmember Confidence survey. The full report is now available for your review. Click here to download it.

Responding to feedback from our members, we’re pleased to announce our new Prospect Surveying service.

Using our Prospect Surveying template, the service will enable you to collect detailed feedback from homeowners who are either evaluating your company or who have decided not to work with you.  The questions cover a range of topics — including the homeowner’s decision-making criteria and your performance in listening to their needs, presenting appropriate solutions, and following-up.  You will be able to identify the areas in which you exceeded and fell short of expectations.

The service will leverage our telephone, email, and mail card surveying process in order to generate a higher response rate than you might achieve with email or mail alone.  The “live” conversations between our surveyors and the homeowner will provide rich, actionable commentary that can help you close more business and better manage your sales team.

Over the last few months, we’ve beta tested the service with our own sales prospects and with a select group of members, including WindowPRO and Case Design/Remodeling.  For these two members, prospects were surveyed after the initial sales appointment and during their evaluation.  The survey is short and sweet, taking no more than 2-3 minutes to complete.  40-50% of those surveyed have been willing to complete the survey, providing information on a large number of prospects.

Here’s what Jake Zahnow, CEO of WindowPRO, has to say about their experience… “this provides another touch point with our prospects to find out exactly where they are in the decision process.” Jake reviews every completed survey, then follows up with his salespeople to close the loop with the homeowner.  He is surveying 100% of the company’s prospects, which he believes sets the stage for another GuildQuality survey once they become customers – “it shows that we listen.”

Homa Nowrouzi of Case Design/Remodeling shares that they survey a sample of prospects every month, and are “sharing the information broadly within the organization to create healthy competition and excellence at every level.”  Homa indicates that the company’s closing ratio on new business has improved, and they have built the results into compensation plans.

There is no additional cost to add this service — you simply pay on a per survey basis.  The data and feedback is kept in a separate GuildQuality account, so this will not affect your scores for customer surveying.

If you are interested, please contact us at support@guildquality.com.  We can have you up and running very quickly.

Spotted long-time member Revival Construction‘s sign this morning in Ansley Park.

In the dashboard of our members’ accounts, users see a feed of all the major activity that relates to their membership. Below the feed is a ticker of all their recent survey responses.

GuildQuality uses our application for our own member satisfaction surveying and performance reporting, and below is our feed and ticker.

7/21/2009 update: CLICK HERE to download the full report.

An increasing number of members are expecting near term improvement in their company’s performance and the market in general, relative to the prior two quarters.**

The Guildmember Confidence Index is a measure of the percentage of members that forecast improvement minus the percentage that forecast decline. A positive number indicates that more members forecast improvement than decline. 100% is the highest possible number (if everyone forecasted improvement) and -100% is the lowest possible number (if everyone forecasted decline).

The GCI for members’ own companies is 49.5% for this quarter, up from 41.6% and -2.3% in Q1 2009 and Q4 2008 respectively. The GCI for the market in general is at 43.3%, up from 26.8% and -35.4% in Q1 2009 and Q4 2008 respectively. The former number is members’ assessment of their own businesses prospects. The latter is those same members’ assessment of the larger home building, remodeling, and real estate market.

We first conducted this survey of our home builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers in October of 2008, and have since conducted the survey in the last two weeks of each quarter.

Thank you to all the members that have participated so far. I’ll publish a complete summary of the feedback, including comments and more data, within the next couple weeks.

** We continue to receive responses from members, and I expect the Q2 numbers to change very slightly. My final report will include all responses.

CLICK HERE to download the full report for Q2 2009. The Q1 2009 report is available here.